Destined to Be Ingested

Director: Sofian Khan
Year Released: 2008

THE CHARGE: Pandering to the B-movie crowd by coming up with one of the best titles in recent exploitation cinema.

THE EVIDENCE: I’ll admit it: the title sucked me in. A title as lurid as Destined to Be Ingested had me expecting an exploitation flick along the lines of Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox. Hell, I half expected a repackaging of “Ferox” with a few extra minutes of ultra-low budget footage shoehorned in. After all, if you’ve seen one cannibal movie, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Right?

As it turns out, that’s not the case. “Destined” manages to do something different with the genre. But it also proves that different doesn’t necessarily mean better.

The movie opens with some embarrassingly bad green screen footage of a small group of people on a boat, heading for a tropical island vacation. But the captain, a 350-lb rotund mass named “Macho”, doesn’t know aft from starboard and delivers the group to the wrong island. The vacationers try to make the best of things and head to the beach on a small raft to engage in some sunbathing and coke sniffing. But when Macho, using binoculars to spy on the group from his boat, sees natives creeping out from the surrounding brush, he turns his boat around and hightails it out of there, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

Guess which one is the native.

It’s a classic set-up and I expected the rest of the movie’s lean 77-minute run time to have the vacationers be killed and devoured one by one. The only question in my mind was if the movie would go with a happy ending and have one survivor escape the island, or go the dark route and finish with everyone dead.

But the movie throws in a twist: one of the natives falls in love with one of the survivors. And at this point, the movie completely changes gears and switches from cannibal movie to Tarzan clone. The tribesman takes our heroine to a hut and begins caring for her, bringing her food and protecting her from the rest of his tribe. And after a “six months later” title card, our heroine walks out of the hut very pregnant!

It’s only at this point that the rebellious tribesman tries to integrate his baby mama with the rest of his village, which the tribe – led by a very white king who looks more like a paunchy used car salesman than an island native – is reluctant to accept. But all attempts to have everyone live together happily ever after are interrupted when all the people who have been killed in the movie suddenly decide to return as zombies and attack the village.

Come on, honey. Our friends would love to have you for dinner.

I’ve seen the cannibal/zombie mash-up done before and the two genres can work well together. But sandwiching a Tarzan love story in between it all really throws off the pacing and tone of the movie. The director, Sofian Khan, clearly cares more about the comparison and contrast between the natives and the white rich interlopers, and the second act of the movie – all about the love story – is very well filmed and acted. It was even filmed on location in the British Virgin Islands, which makes the shoddy green screen opening look even cheaper in comparison. Why green screen if you’re already on location? Is it that hard to keep a camera steady on a boat?

Ultimately, if feels like Khan had no confidence that his love story would find an audience, so he hid it in between cannibal and zombie attacks. Even the “cannibals” aren’t really cannibals by the traditional exploitation definition. There’s only one scene of cannibalism where the natives ritually devour their dead leader, and it occurs late in the movie. I suppose this makes sense because, if all the vacationing victims were eaten, how would they come back as zombies for the grand finale?

But the finale isn’t really grand and it rushes through to an unsatisfying ending. So we end up with a movie where the set-up is perfunctory, the ending is forced, and the middle is not what someone interested in a movie called Destined to Be Ingested would typically expect to see. (Though the movie’s original title “Holocaust Holocaust” isn’t any better.)


THE VERDICT: Most movies work best when you know very little about them going in. Not this one. Despite the quality of the middle section of the movie, Destined to Be Ingested is found GUILTY of being a misleading disappointment.