Dr. Williams (spaghetti western star Anthony Steffan, who also has a
story credit), chief surgeon at a Port au Prince hospital, as well as
the city’s meat inspector (?), has created a new drug during his free
time, and since that drug is a powerful hallucinogen and not a vaccine,
everyone
wants to get their hands on it. But the doctor has no reason to
suspect his friend Fred (Gabriele Tinti, before he married—and started
doing softcore sex flicks with—Laura Gemser) of having any motives beyond enjoying an exotic holiday with his wife Grace (Anita Strindberg). Fred, however,
definitely suspects Grace of wanting to bump uglies with Williams.
(Who would blame her? Not only is Steffan ruggedly handsome, but unlike
Fred, he is not a raging asshole.)
This one was a pleasant surprise. True, there are better giallos out there, but I found El tropico del cancro (a.k.a. Tropic of Cancer or Death in Haiti)
a lot of fun, with generous helpings of sex, violence and weirdness.
Directors Giampaolo Lomi and Edoardo Mulargia make the most of their
film’s location, juxtaposing the exotic glamor of the tourist spots with
the poverty of the people who live there. The locals themselves seem to
be little more than colorful background, however, performing voodoo
rituals, serving drinks and, in the case of the young manservant for
flamboyant businessman Mr. Peacock (Gordon Felio, giving us a
Divine-out-of-drag performance before Divine was even a star), providing
more intimate services, or so it’s heavily implied. El tropico del cancro isn’t worthy of either a NAACP or GLAAD award but considering the time in which this was made it isn’t nearly as problematic as I feared it might be.
The
movie’s most notorious scene — the one reviewers on IMDb bring up the
most, anyway — is when Grace is drugged by Stewart’s potent hallucinogen
and embarks on a trip that has her fleeing a colony of tarantulas and
running down a deep red hallway, wearing nothing but a sheer dressing
gown, while naked Black men reach for her. The scene culminates with
Grace losing her gown and stepping into the arms of a well-hung voodoo
priest, a moment prominently featured in the poster. Some of the
negative reviews I saw cited this scene as the movie’s nadir, but I
suspect that might have more to do with sequence featuring a lot of
penises. (Calm down, fanboys, this movie features plenty of tits, too.)
The sequence
is kinda’ silly, but it’s also trippy and sexy and
deliciously ’70s— it looks like porno chic perfume ad — so I found it to
be one of the movie’s high points. Also, did I mention the scene
features a lot of penises?
