Destined to be Ingested Review

Destined to be Ingested (Holocaust Holocaust) (2008) Reviewed by B. Schuessler

The story of  a group of tourists that pay for a cruise of the tropical waters while on vacation via a small-sized boat that gets lost was a fairly large waste of money and effort by my calculations. The little indie horror film had some moments, but way too few and not too often. Although for some obscure reason, the film has a campy yet charming quality to it. Although the overdubbing was awful and quite annoying at times. I found myself focusing on watching each actor and actress deliver their lines of dialogue instead of listening to the plot and taking in the story.

Aside from some very bad acting that had lines of dialogue with really shoddy delivery, the film moved at a relatively quick pace and had an above-average score to accompany the film. The plot is fairly common: One day Anna and Tom become filthy rich from playing the stock market and are living an unreal lifestyle full of champagne, cocaine, and caviar and the next moment the captain of the ship gets them lost and has no clue as to where they are and what they are going to do. This conundrum leads our clueless travelers to a seemingly isolate island, which they decide to go to and have their vacation.

Note to self: Isolate islands in the South Pacific are never truly isolated, whether it be dangerous animals, dangerous humans, or CANNIBALS.  In this case, its very dangerous cannibals from a flesh-eating tribe. The film’s gore gets kicked up a notch as human flesh is digested, or ingested, as the title suggests and just like a bobblehead that has been whacked with the stroke of a hand, the action goes bobbing around from ultra dull to semi-interesting. The film has an over-all professional look and feel to it, but just needs a higher caliber of acting and maybe a writer to come up with some funnier and smarter lines of dialogue.

I cannot say enough how much I really enjoyed the musical score to this film. It definitely was the best part of the whole film. Even when scenes were lacking in style or plot, if there was music being played, I was at least somewhat entertained. If one does not like the score from this film, you are really sh*t outta luck! I also think it was pretty humourous that their cast consisted of two fellas that definitely should not be wearing the trademarked Speedo swimsuit, also known as the coveted  “banana hammock”. Utterly gross.  Seriously, why couldn’t the filmmakers gotten some better looking talent to be strutting around in next to nothing?

The cast, Manuel Fihman as the portly captain for the ship Macho, Amanda (Kitty) Cole as Anna, Suzi Lorraine as Sandy, Theodore Bouloukos as Chester,  Kris Eivers as Tom,  James Manzo as Tiok, Bill Weeden as Hemle, Noshir Dalal as Kohi, and Randall Heller as Nejalo. I think that the performances given by the members of the cannibal tribe were far better than any given by the cultured characters the cast had to play while on the boat. That may not be saying anything, though.

I guess it should be noted that this is not probably going to be categorized as a typical cannibal film, as there are zombies in the film at some point. There is a tribe of cannibals that break some sacred curse wide open and the dead come back to life to eat up the whole tribe. The make-up for the zombies was pretty decent and it was enjoyable to watch them roaming, but the gore level should fave been much higher and been more of a priority in a “zombie flick” that has cannibals as an integral portion of the film’s plot.

If one wants a memorable film to watch on a cannibal tribe, rent Cannibal Holocaust, Jungle Holocaust, The Catherine Miles Story or a huge number of any other cannibal/ jungle films- just skip this one. If one wants to rent a decent, if not incredible zombie film, look to Romero or Fulci, not this film by this director. Director Sofian Khan could have potentially made a very solid independent feature, but Destined to be Ingested just misses its mark.