7. Prisoner Of The Cannibal God
Prisoner of the Cannibal God was an Italian film from 1978 that starred Ursula Andress of James Bond fame. The film was banned in the UK until 2001 because of its extreme graphic violence. It revolved around a woman who went to New Guinea in search of her missing anthropologist husband, only to encounter a group of cannibalistic primitives. She is stripped naked and prepared for honey torture (which involves, among other things, covering the victim in a sugary substance to attract insects that will bite and sting them), but instead of being irritated to death by exotic mosquitoes, Andress somehow becomes a goddess. That was a near miss. Putting aside the imperialistic theme and offensive depiction of indigenous people, Prisoner of the Cannibal God also features gratuitous animal violence involving a monitor lizard being gutted and a monkey eaten by a python, which was only included in an attempt to emulate other popular films in the subgenre, such as Cannibal Holocaust. It's clear that animal abuse as shock value was a convenient substitute for actual storytelling ability in the late 1970s, and for that reason more than anything else, Prisoner of the Cannibal God deserves its place on this list.