The title CANNIBAL DINER and the poster led me to imagine that this was going to be a movie about an establishment that serves up human flesh for the eating. Though admittedly quite distasteful, the topic has had some surprisingly good treatments, such as DELICATESSEN (1991), EATING RAOUL (1982) and especially THE GREEN BUTCHERS (2003). Even cheesier treatments like MOTEL HELL (1980) and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2(1986), which are not really good movies, have managed to do something with this idea. Alas, the title is positively deceptive and, in a way, so is the poster: there are cannibals, but there is no diner (could it be that the German film-makers meant "dinner"??).
This film turns out to be yet another take on the well-worn theme of hot chicks being hunted, this time by chemically contaminated cannibal mutants(?) who are just actors in black face-paint.
Though I would not call this film amateurish, it comes close. Even worse, it lacks even one ounce of originality, as most scenes are borrowed from other movies. There are many scenes of the girls walking around which end up just providing ample opportunities to check how much longer the movie is going to be. In more than one of those walking scenes, I was stunned by the incongruence between the lack of tension in the scene and the excitement conveyed by the stock music, even more so because the director apparently also wrote some of the music, and as such would have been expected to have a better feel for how the music and the visuals go together.
This movie's worst sin is that it is unrelentingly, mercilessly boring. I do not think I have ever checked as much and impatiently anticipated when a film is going to be over, even though it clocks in at only 75 minutes.
I sometimes read in negative movie reviews expressions of regret or anger about how the reviewer's time was wasted, but this kind of thought almost never occurs to me. I appreciate that putting together a movie is a major undertaking, and even if it is bad, it still represents a sustained effort by a group of people to make a vision a reality. This deserves to be applauded and appreciated just on its own. And usually I do, and therefore I almost never regard my time as wasted, even if the film was profoundly bad.
But here, the pointless ending after having endured excessively indulgent yet stultifyingly boring walking/chasing scenes did actually bring up feelings of annoyance at having wasted my time with this. In the future, I will strictly avoid all works by this director.
