​CIBO DI VIOLENZA (AKA THE FOOD OF VIOLENCE)

Dir. Bazz Hancher, UK, 12 mins

It's a rare stop on our worldwide your of extreme cinema to my home country – I've yet to establish a strong feeling of a big UK extreme horror scene right now, but presumably it is out there and maybe it's something that's growing and we may come to see a bit more of. Admittedly today's piece is only a short one, and is more of a documentary than anything, but I was certainly interested to check it out nonetheless. It did also beg the question of why the title is in another language if it's an English movie, but let's not get too distracted by that. Today's offering for your delectation is Cibo Di Violenza.
 
The film itself concerns the use of dead baby foetuses being sold as a delicacy to sometimes suspecting and sometimes unsuspecting people, as well as them being used in some rather more common products that you may recognise (although I won't mention those brand names here). The opening is pretty confronting as we see some fairly graphic and bloody medical-style footage, before we slip into a narration by blogger Mike Lima. His is the voice we'll hear most throughout, and his work is pretty solid. There's a look at some of the famous cases of cannibalism in the world – including controversial Chinese artist Zhu Yu, whose man-eating antics proved to be a fake – as well as the rumours of restaurants purchasing foetuses to sell in their restaurants, before a glimpse into the world of aborted foetuses being imported into the UK for upwards of £3000 and a man apparently cooking one up to eat himself. ('Look, it's gone white like chicken.') We close with some talk of the flesh of the foetuses being used in far more mainstream products before we check out with the credits, which again include some pretty unpleasant and unremitting images.
 
It's a slightly hard one to rate really, as it is obviously exploring a subject that is pretty taboo and that most folks out there are going to find – if you'll excuse the turn of phrase – pretty unsavoury. It's described as a 'shockumentary', which to me as a term casts a touch of doubt on how much of this is genuine and how much of this might be made up, or if scenes have been shot that aren't the real thing. It's not badly put together, although some of the shots and choices of images are clearly there just to make it all more extreme and hard to watch. The narration over the top is decent, although how credible some of those reports really are is questionable – the use of footage from Infowars certainly isn't what I'd call dependable news. Some of the links between things are also a bit tenuous for me. If you watch it and believe everything that you see in this movie, then the odds are you will be pretty appalled, but I just found it hard not to take a pinch of salt with what was being said. Overall it's decent but just tries a little too hard to be confrontational rather than just giving the facts, which – if taken at face value – are shocking enough without the need for any embellishment or elaboration.
 
RATING: 5/10: Odd titling aside, Cibo Di Violenza is OK. The visuals are generally good – although they do obviously reach for shock value in places – and the narrative itself is interesting enough. It may all be true, it may not – I suppose it's out to you to watch for yourself and take out of it what you will. Personally some of the content felt a bit farfetched and as such lost a bit of its sinister tone. It's also extremely short – although officially running at 12 minutes, without the closing and opening credits you probably have eight at tops. A decent effort but nothing unmissable – 5/10 seems about fair.