Cannibal Girls (1973)

Seeing as how Ivan Reitman has spent most of his career directing family-friendly comedies, it’s odd to realize that the Canadian filmmaker was heavy into horror during his early years. In fact, his first project to gain a stateside release was his sophomore directorial effort, the shabby gorefest Cannibal Girls. Generously described in some quarters as a spoof of horror flicks, the movie plays straight simply because neither the characterizations nor the storyline has sufficient wit to produce reactions other than boredom. The only reason Cannibal Girls isn’t a total snooze is that Reitman periodically displays blood or breasts (if not both simultaneously). There’s also some novelty value stemming from Reitman’s involvement and the presence of future comedy stars Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, whose roles are only quasi-comedic in nature. However, Cannibal Girls is perhaps best characterized as an embarrassing rite of passage that each of the participants had to endure on the way to better things. Set in rural Ontario, the picture follows young lovers Clifford (Levy) and Gloria (Martin), who stumble into a small town where three young women are reputed to be cannibals. Meanwhile, Reitman depicts the adventures of the young women, who woo men back to their remote home, kill the men, and eat their flesh. The women are under the thrall of Reverend Alex St. John (Ronald Ulrich), a loon who spews nonsense about extending life by consuming people. Eventually, Clifford and Gloria end up in the killers’ lair, with nasty results. Cheap-looking, clumsily edited, and filled with forgettable performances, Cannibal Girls probably spends too much time on dialogue scenes to keep gore mavens interested, and it offers nothing to beguile general viewers. In sum, Cannibal Girls offers scant evidence that just one decade later, Reitman would masterfully blend comedy and horror in Ghostbusters (1984).

Cannibal Girls: LAME

Meatballs (1979)

          Mostly notable as Bill Murray’s movie-star debut—and his first collaboration with director Ivan Reitman, of Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984) fame—the Canadian indie Meatballs is an amiably insouciant comedy. The picture depicts how the counselors and kids at a second-rate summer camp embrace their also-ran status throughout a summer filled with mischief, sex, and sticking it to their obnoxious counterparts at another camp. Although the premise suggests a lowbrow comedy filled with bathroom humor and panty raids, Meatballs is all bark and no bite, at least in terms of the usual teen-comedy tropes. Excepting a tame sequence of dudes eavesdropping on an all-girls cabin, the sex in the movie is discreet and romantic, and the biggest bathroom joke is a toilet flush broadcast over a loudspeaker. Even the naughty language is comparatively innocuous.

          Instead of crassness, the movie focuses on sweet storylines about people nurturing and supporting each other. Murray plays Tripper Harrison, ringleader of the CITs (counselors-in-training) at Camp North Star, an underfunded facility catering to lower-middle-class kids. Tripper’s the quintessential Murray character, a cocky jokester who talks a great anarchistic line even though he’s basically decent; his raison d’être is getting others to loosen up and resist authority. Tripper is also the only properly developed character in the picture, presumably because Murray added interesting flourishes during production. Everyone else is a cliché—the horny nerd, the tweaked pyromaniac, the uptight administrator.

          Most of the story concerns Tripper’s sensitive friendship with a lonely young misfit, Rudy (Chris Makepeace), Tripper’s courtship with fellow CIT Roxanne (Kate Lynch), and Camp North Star’s various run-ins with the stuck-up folks at neighboring Camp Mohawk. Yet the story is primarily just a string of random vignettes until the climax, when the camps face off in a sports competition. (Cue rousing music as unlikely hero Rudy saves the day.) Though generally pleasant to watch, Meatballs lacks anything particularly memorable—excepting, of course, Murray’s wiseass persona—but Makepeace, who later starred in My Bodyguard (1980), does a lot with a little, turning his thinly written character into a empathetic screen presence. Furthermore, it’s hard not to root for the ne’er-do-wells at Camp North Star, and Murray’s appeal is undeniable.

Meatballs: FUNKY