Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 6.5

A group of friends in search of the legendary Tasmanian tiger encounter a forgotten town full of cannibals.

It’s actually a bit hard to sum up the full plot of this movie in just a few sentences, but I will try. Along with the supposedly extinct Tasmanian tiger, this story delves into the notorious legend of Alexander Pearce, aka “The Pieman”, a prisoner who managed to escape a feared British prison settlement and disappeared into the Tasmanian wild woods. Legend apparently has it the Pieman had a taste for human flesh, and in this particular movie the town of Sarah deep in Tasmania has inbred directly not only from the Pieman himself, but also inherited with gusto his strange tastes, the whole town.

Now, okay. I can easily see a whole town, forgotten and ignored by the rest of the world, practicing cannibalism with relative ease. (That’s a terrible pun, now that I think about it.) But it makes me wonder, if the town has a tendency to eat tourists that wander into their midsts, how do they decide who lives and who dies? What happens when their insatiable appetites for flesh come on again and there’s no tourists around, do we draw straws to decide who among the townfolk gets eaten? And I have a real hard time believing actual cannibals wouldn’t bother taking off things like metal jewelry before they chow down; pigs wouldn’t put up with that.

There are valiant efforts throughout the course of the movie to bring back the admittedly well-thought plot to the limelight, I’m sorry to say it doesn’t work. Little girls with teeth filed to points will always attract more attention than jumpy screams directed at tigers. The cinematography isn’t bad, and the gore certainly looks believeable enough, but the plot is overshadowed by the horror of it all, and it doesn’t seem to me that that’s what the director intended here.

If you don’t know the whole of the plot before watching this movie, you might actually enjoy it more.