This crude and only occasionally gory exploitation film was an early effort from Ivan Reitman, previously the director of the barely seen comedy Foxy Lady (1971) but better known for his later work on films like Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Twins (1988) et al. Cannibal Girls was made on a pittance (it’s said it cost just $12,000) with much of the dialogue improvised and while it’s intermittently funny, it’s never as good as it promises to be.

In the small Ontario town of Farnhamville, a woman wielding an axe murders a couple. Later, Clifford Sturges (Eugene Levy, who had also been in Foxy Lady and soon to join the popular Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV (1976-1984)) and Gloria Wellaby (Andrea Martin, also soon to become an SCTV regular) are the obligatory couple breaking down in their car and being stranded outside a snowy Farnhamville. They wind up at the small motel run by Mrs Wainwright (May Jarvis) who tells them about the local legend of three beautiful young women, Anthea (Randall Carpenter), Clarissa (Bonnie Neilson), and Leona (Mira Pawluk), who lure men to their home and eat them alive to remain eternally youthful. And indeed, the terrible trio are making short work of the locals, all apparently under the charismatic influence of the seemingly friendly Reverend Alex St John (Ronald Ulrich).

There’s an awful lot going on in Cannibal Girls including nightmare sequences, thunderstorms, talk of an escaped lunatic, diners serving human flesh to a town full of cannibals and acts of betrayal and revenge. So, it’s surprising that it all adds up to so very little. Shot over the winter of 1971 and 1972, it would be nice to report that Cannibal Girls is an early trial of the themes that informed Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), but that would be overstating the case considerably. Yes, it was meant to be funny and it features cannibals but the humour in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was of the blackest and most satirical kind whereas it’s all a bit silly here. From time to time, it is amusing, but not much more than that and then only fitfully. It’s hard to know how seriously we were supposed to be taking it though the terrific made-up double bill of The Monster That Devoured Cleveland and I was a Teenage Centipede that Clifford and Gloria briefly consider seeing at the local cinema.

The improvised dialogue doesn’t always work and as a consequence, the story tends to meander without purpose. Levy told Larushka Ivan-Zadeh of the British Metro newspaper in July 2016: “It was a […] largely improvised movie, although we didn’t really know what we were doing back then. So, looking back, I think it is an improvised movie that really needed a script.” It certainly would have helped to tighten things up a bit and keep things focussed on the matter at hand. It might have helped the performances too which are either too lackadaisical or, in the case of Ulrich, just plain terrible. Reitman and his producer and co-writer Daniel Goldberg probably didn’t help matters as much as they thought they were by reshooting re-editing several scenes.

It’s other big problem is that while it’s certainly sleazy, it’s neither gory nor shocking nor funny enough. It needed to be more savage, with a bit more of that hard-to-explain (and likely impossible to recapture) grit that Hooper brought to an out of the way part of Texas. Some prints prepared by the film’s American distributors, American International Pictures, tried to curry some interest by including a warning bell that sounded whenever something nasty was about to happen, a la the “fear flasher” and “horror horn” seen and heard in Hy Averback’s Chamber of Horrors (1966). It was probably to little effect though today the gimmick is missing from the most widely circulated prints.

Cannibal Girls was a big hit for the fledgling Canadian horror industry when it was finally released, after much post-production trauma, the film taking in some $25,000 in its first week of release in Toronto alone. Previous Canadian genre offerings, like Flick (1970), The Reincarnate (1971) and The Pyx (1973) had been fairly restrained, even tame affairs. Cannibal Girls may not have been the gorefest its title suggests but it was certainly a leap forward in grim exploitation that would be surpassed by the even nastier, but far better and more intelligent, David Cronenberg films Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977).

Reitman seems to have remained fond of the film even after all his huge Hollywood studio successes and referenced the film in Ghostbusters II (1989) – look carefully and you’ll see that it’s showing at a cinema during one of the big action scenes. It was still playing in cinemas in the belated sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) directed by Reitman’s son Jason.