"FLORYS soup is good to eat...
always made with the freshest meat"
[TV commercial in THE CANNIBAL MAN]

Released in the US as THE APARTMENT ON THE 13th FLOOR and on English language DVD as Eloy de la Iglesia's THE CANNIBAL MAN [that's the full onscreen title and rather amazing that the director actually gets his name before the title!; this version was directed by Robert H. Oliver, the dubber, credited director of FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS and sometime actor (FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT)].

This is a film which is almost always misunderstood (in its English versions) as a video nasty, as such it was banned in the UK decades ago or as anti-gay ("...inadequate because it merely ends up reinforcing the notion that homosexuals have a special affinity with psychotic killers..." from the review in Phil Hardy's AURUM HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA ;. 266/67: NO, is all I can reply to that one!). The director, producer Trucado, associate producer-actor Vicente Parra took a huge risk with this scenario and it paid off in an ironic manner. And the title above is not misleading as so many state: there IS cannibalism in the movie if you watch it very closely. Marcos, the frustrated slaughterhouse employee who becomes a serial killer, disposes of the body parts in a meat grinder which will transform his work into FLORY soups which the citizens of Spain will then consume!

The first images show (from a dispassionate distance) cattle being bled and cut up in the facility as Marcos eats a sandwhich in the break room. How's that for dialectical montage? The Eisenstein who made BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN would have understood.

Marcos, the nowhere man who quietly reads in his porno decorated hovel, a pig's pen inhabited by a human swine who would no more think of cleaning the walls or emptying the garbage than he would in attempt to dispose of his victims in a more sanitary manner. The film is structured around its SPANISH title, the Week of the Killer, in that there is a killing for six consecutive days before Marcos goes to "confession" (with "gay" neighbor Nestor as the priest) and turns himself in.

Actually, Nestor, the man on the 13th floor, who observes Marcos' spree through expensive binoculars (or does he?) can be considered the focus (he instructs Marcos in focus technique). After the slaughterhouse precredits sequence the film's proper opens and closes with Raul Artigot's razor sharp lens drawing a line between the high rise in which Nestor views the grubby reality of the proletarian masses on the edge of town. That distance is the subject matter and meat of the film. Artigot's camera rides the rails again and again across that distance, finally rising in a transcendent crane shot as Marcos waits on his porch for the police to arrive.

As in Bunuel's LOS OLVIDADOS (1950), animals which exist off decay (dogs and flies) surround the denizens of the slum and will, in the end, survive the exhausted humans. It's hard work to be one of the working poor. One isn't asked to feel sorry for Marcos, only to understand his collapse into fear and desperation. He is not "psychotic", the killings are impulsive and fear-driven, to cover up his accidental killing of a cab driver. He is not a sociopath or a psychopath, he is... an average Spaniard circa 1972. The flies have a special interest in Marcos as do the dogs since he keeps his bodies in his bedroom while considering means of disposal. In a way the film can be read, and enjoyed, as a low key black comedy. One only has to consider the jolly perfume merchant or the suddenly apologetic police detective who withdraws when he realizes Nestor lives in the expensive high-rise and is slumming with Marcos. Class trumps sex, criminality and friendship in the film's moral dumpster. Marcos cannot accept love, and everyone around him does love him; Nextor cannot give love, only an offer of "help" when it is way too late.

The elements which stay with me from the film are, first and foremost, the haunted, strangely "empty" presence which Vincente Parra embodies and the melancholy trumpet stylings (interrupted by strange bleeps, boops and buzzes during the decay sequences) of Feranando Garcia Morcillo (LOS BLUES CALLE POP; VOODOO BLACK EXORCIST). Parra is an unknown actor to me and I'm sure most non-Spanish viewers, but his loutish, greased-hair look, a not-quite-all-there ambiance about him, speaks volumes. We've all known characters like this.

It's interesting that all the killings involve some sort of head trauma, choking, bashing, slashing, chopping, the final one evoking the machete-in-the-face from Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD (1971). The head is the most reachable target for the desperate Marcos, all he has to do is reach for a tool, a kitchen implement or just reach out. One feels how fear turns into sloth. Once again, these are not planned killings, they are impulsive by a compulsive, self absorbed isolator. If Marcos had married the class-anxious Paula (a perfectly cast Emma Cohen) he probably would have ended up killing her... but he would have planned it out.

Having been in Francisco Franco's Spain during 1973 [illegally, I admit, since my passport wasn't properly stamped and I was into jumping trains and borders for the fun of it]. I was finally caught and asked (at machine gun point, those Civil Guard guys were scary) to get the fuck out and never come back. The one night I was there I was in a city center and walked around looking at displays with mannequins as average Spaniards milled about uncomprehending of my growing paranoia. I know, I was there. I'll never return. I wasn't into Spanish horror films, didn't know they made them. I did want to go to Almeria to visit my favorite Spanish western locations. But I didn't make it there. I knew they appreciated tourists, but ONLY if you had money, something I didn't have. And you didn't want to be in Spain in 1973 if you had long hair, were broke, had a bad passport and looked unkempt. But for that one evening I could understand Marcos' alienation as depicted in the scene of him walking through the city in the midst of the undifferentiated masses. Maybe that's what it's all about. I don't know. I've only seen one other film by the late director and didn't like it. But LA SEMANA... in its depiction of "forced" cannibalism, forced on the unwitting (as in THE VAMPIRES NIGHT ORGY, also co written by Antonio Fos) it hits me in the same way that Eugenio Martin's 1973 A CANDLE FOR THE DEVIL does. They probably say more about the Spanish fear of outsiders and the horrors of the Franco regime than any "respectable" socially-conscious tract could articulate.