"They made him into a god. They probably thought the Geiger counter was his heart."

I can sense your desperation, mortals. You're looking for your next rush, your next taste of that which is weird, horrific, forbidden. I hear you cry out in the night for something disgusting, perhaps even morally reprehensible, to watch.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Slave of the Cannibal God.

This 1978 adventure tale by Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino is probably not the first cannibal movie, but it did beat the more famous Cannibal Holocaust to the punch by about two years, and I enjoyed it just as much. It might not be as nasty as Holocaust, but it does star Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach, and it's still pretty doggone nasty.

Andress plays Susan, whose husband has gone missing on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea. She and her brother go to the consulate only to be told the extent of her husband's research was illegal -- the government of New Guinea told him to stay out of that jungle, and no, they will not help find him. Susan's only hope is to hire Professor Edward Foster (Keach) another anthropologist who has a pretty good idea where Susan's husband went, because he's the guy who told him about it.

Foster himself had gotten lost and discovered an especially savage tribe called the Puka. They're not your run-of-the-mill, naked, indigenous people. They wear masks, paint their bodies white, and eat people. Their journey will be treacherous, and they are sure to witness many animals eating other animals. They will probably lose all their native guides along the way, but sure Foster will put together a search party. It must be the way Susan says, "I must find my husband," or maybe that she says it a hundred times.

They encounter big spiders, giant bats, and man-eating crocodiles. There's always some side drama involving the local fauna in this movie, including an especially gratuitous scene in which an enormous snake constricts and swallows a monkey. It's a revolting display of nature at its most cruel, worthy of narration by Sir David Attenborough, if only some stagehand hadn't pushed the monkey into the snake's mouth with a stick.

The search party enjoys a stay with a Christian missionary, and enjoy the drumming and hallucinogenic liquor of regurgitated berries of a friendlier tribe, but get kicked out because Susan's brother is a fornicator.

It isn't long before the expedition is whittled down to just the white people, and they are captured by the Puka. I don't want to spoil it any further, suffice it to say, the subsequent orgy of death and bestiality is pretty impressive.

The music by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis is great in the way most Italian horror soundtracks of the 1970s are great. There's this throbbing sound that whoop-whoomp-whoomps across the whole movie whenever anything scary happens. It sounds like an ultrasound machine.

Slave of the Cannibal God is action-packed, ethically questionable, and gross as all get-out. Animals were most assuredly harmed during making of this film. It streams on Amazon Prime. You can also find it on Shudder under the title Mountain of the Cannibal God.  It's also on YouTube.