Man oh man, do I ever love a movie in which an olive-complected hospital attendant gets caught literally red-handed, because he’s chomping on a heart freshly plucked from an on-the-slab body! But man oh man, do I ever love more a movie that then has that shamed, swarthy man hurl himself through a plate-glass window and to his death several floors below, the impact of which pops one of his arms clean from his torso. No worries — it’s back attached for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.
In other words, man oh man, do I ever love Doctor Butcher M.D. (Per its infamous ad hype, those initials stand for “Medical Deviate.”) Yes, this film by “Frank Martin” (Marino Girolami, The Fury of Achilles) is also known as Zombie Holocaust, but I prefer the Butcher moniker because the Italian flick is more a cannibal movie than an undead one. Either way, it’s a heap of grindhouse trash, in the best meaning of the phrase.
Plot is incidental. A few educated and attractive white people go to a tropical island inhabited by dark-skinned primitives who are not. The tribesmen wear only a modicum of fabric and feast on the blood and guts of others. One of those others — but he’s not English, so it’s okay, the movie seems to say — is impaled in multiple spots, thanks to a jungle-floor booby trap, and then has his neck turned into a sanguine spigot. Another other unwittingly becomes a live buffet, complete with “eye”-petizers.
Following all this carnivorous cannibal activity time, a few zombies shamble into frame, not to mention a fully nude Alexandra Delli Colli (The New York Ripper) as the hot-honky sacrifice the subgenre demands, and a thankfully clothed Donald O’Brien (Ghosthouse) as — spoiler not spoiler — the evil Dr. Obrero (né Butcher, one assumes), working on a way to extend the human life span by 100 years. He fails. —Rod Lott