Written, directed and produced by Matthew Roth, The Man who Collected Food (also released as Cannibal Collector) is a parable of modern consumerist society.

Miguel (Mike N. Kelly) is the unexceptional, almost unnoticeable man next door (like most modern cannibals), who is quietly (or sometimes noisily) proud of his collection. What he collects is food, and he hoards it in cupboards and on display shelving. Like any serious collector (think of Barbie collections or comic books), it is definitely not for consumption.

He carefully stores his purchases in their original packaging, knowing that they would be ruined as collector’s items if he were to open them or, heaven forbid, eat them! Like any obsession, collecting takes over his life.

To survive without spoiling his collection, he eats people. He won’t open any of his food packets, but has a cold-room full of abducted humans, collected according to ethnicity, some already cooked, others tied and gagged and awaiting prep, which involves unfastening them and then chasing and killing them with various fun toys like mediaeval maces.

“Mother always told me to never play with my food. But I don’t think she know how much fun it really is.”

It’s just his quirk, and his neighbours are presented as even crazier than him. There’s the deer hunters, identical father and son in matching lumberjack plaid, and then there’s Kelvin, who runs around with a shotgun shooting at aliens (and who is covered in what he claims are bits of their green brains).

Kelvin sums up the film’s theme:

“I believe that there’s something a little strange in all of us. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, there’s just that one thing we don’t want anyone else to know about.”

Miguel attends a group therapy meeting for people with traumas and more common addictions like sex and cigarettes. He tells the group he collects food, which doesn’t seem that big a deal, until he adds,

“In order to keep my collection in mint condition, I have to resort to cannibalism.”

He tells them he can’t eat “animals” because they are food, and so belong in his collection. The facilitator asks him how that is logical, in that people are also food, at least to cannibals, but he points out that people are not food to other people.

“They don’t package or can people, if they had people-sized packages, then you’d have a better argument.”

She might have had better luck pointing out that people are animals too. Instead, she announces that they are all going to go to his home to open all his packets as therapy, and that makes him really mad. The middle of the film is a long, slow-motion sequence of him killing all the people in the group, and then the cleaner who finds the bodies.

His secret is discovered by the deer hunters who decide to hunt him, until he kills and eats them, then hears a phone message about a friend who keeps escaping death in various accidents and is called “the luckiest man in the world”.

Taking the essentialist argument seriously, Miguel decides that eating such a man might allow him to incorporate that luck, and finally find what he has been searching for: “that package of Ranch Wall Rice with Chicken and Vegetables”. Eating the “luckiest man in the world” will, he hopes, make him lucky.

Taking obsession to its logical conclusion, The Man Who Collected Food is a black comedy (or red comedy given the amounts of gore) with a serious message; a critique of modern consumerism.

“It’s all because I’m different. Sometimes I just wish I could collect comics or coins or anything – it has to be food, food, food!”

Our appetites are incited by marketing and advertising, while at the same time we are told that the Earth is being destroyed by our voracious cravings. We are insatiable, and yet we are ashamed of that. As Dylan said,

“If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine,
but it’s all right Ma, it’s life and life only!”

The script is somewhat feeble and the acting varies between wooden and histrionic. The film earned a respectable 71% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, even though there are no reviews listed. But nonetheless, it’s entertaining and funny, the theme music by Daniel Alcheh is terrific, and the gore hounds will appreciate the amount of carnage. And it actually has a lot to say about obsession, greed, consumerist voracity, and the illogical cultural binaries of edibility and abhorrence. Worth a look, if you can find it.