Quick question: have you ever thought about changing your life – what you do, where you go, with whom you interact? Most people have.

This film, Cannibal Comedian, is both a comedy and a gorefest, but it asks a serious question: are we confined by who we are, what we do, what we eat? Just stating an identity can get you into all sorts of trouble: try saying “I’m a vegan” in a butcher shop, or “I’m a liberal” in Wyoming, or “I’m a Zionist” on a trendy college campus.

Charlie (Aaron Prager) is a desert-based cannibal, charming in a Ted Bundy sort of way, who chops up his victims and sells them as meatballs on the roadside, often killing and grinding up his customers to make the next batch of subs, cheered on by his very strange meatball-loving customer Eleanor (Mis Sadistic).

The desert cannibal is a trope explored originally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre andThe Hills Have Eyes. A half-hearted attempt to tie it into cannibal mythology makes for some absurd opening cards.

In the desert, morality is optional and belonging to your community is everything – the Sheriff and Eleanor know exactly what Charlie is doing, and eagerly await his mince, but outsiders are fair game (there’s a pun for you, Charlie!)

But Charlie wants to break out of being restricted to one identity and become what we all sometimes daydream about: a standup comedian. It makes sense – there is a lot of comedy in cannibal films – think of Hannibal’s line “I’m having an old friend for dinner”. Or Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, where a seductive succubus named Coral leads a horny guy to bed, saying “I can’t wait to have you inside me”. Or the wonderful TV series The Horror of Delores Roach, in which the strong eating the weak is defined as “That’s just like Darwin and shit, man”. When Charlie captures carefree hippie singer Chrystal (Austin Judd), she becomes his audience and his muse, since she is a real entertainer. She encourages him to follow his dream, hoping he won’t be eating her as the after-show supper.

Charlie overcomes his nervousness and finally (halfway through the film!) appears on stage at a standup club called the Funny Pit, in front of the mandatory brick wall, dressed in his butcher apron and covered in blood from a couple of stoners who had tried to rob his house. The audience like the outfit and the cannibal jokes, and his career takes off.  Some examples of his dad/cannibal jokes:

“What do you get when you put a sixty-year-old woman in a motorised wheelchair?”
“Fast food.”

“She was starting to get a little moody and I asked her ‘what’s eating ya?’and she said ‘You are!’”

“Beauty only runs skin deep… it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

“When I put him through the meat grinder, that’s when I knew he was a well grounded individual.”

“I started to eat plant-based – I only eat vegans now. Which tastes like annoying.”

But Charlie soon finds that hecklers can disrupt his whole routine. Any weakness and the predator becomes the prey. But Charlie has his own method of dealing with hecklers.

When Charlie finds out that the owner of the Funny Pit, Carrey (Robert Dunne), is not letting him perform because he wants to steal Charlie’s act for himself, the shit (and various other bodily fluids) really hits the fan. When Carrey asks if Charlie is planning to eat him, Charlie replies:

“I don’t eat rotten people”

And when Carrey asks Charlie to PLEASE stop with the cannibal jokes, Charlie replies:

“You know, being a cannibal, you think it’s a joke? You know, this is my life!”

There are a few intertextual references to cannibal films such as Charlie dressing like Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

There are no major plot twists, in fact there isn’t much of a plot (or a budget apparently). So when his long-suffering captive and audience Chrystal finally knocks him down and escapes, she tells him:

“We both share that hunger for the spotlight.”

Chrystal is also a cannibal now, since human meat is all Charlie fed her, and she has kept herself alive by encouraging Charlie to workshop his act instead of eating her. She thus becomes both a cannibal and a comedian, sating her hunger for the spotlight, just as he did.

The most interesting question from the film is Charlie’s status as a cannibal. How did he decide to eat people? Is it the spirit of the wild places, the shortage of other food sources in rural areas, or was he born that way? When he shouts, “this is my life!” he implies there was no other choice for him. Chrystal is forced into cannibalism by hunger, but seems to see nothing particularly wrong with it, as long as it does not apply to her own body. Neither she nor Charlie seem to see anything particularly wrong with eating humans, as opposed to other animals.

Fun fact: AFTER I wrote this blog, I found that PETA was using a similar pun, Bone voyage, in a post about travelling with dogs. Maybe they saw this movie. After all, they listed four cannibal films in their “Top 10 Movies That Make You Go Meatless”!