Watching something you aren’t supposed to is almost a rite of passage for a young person. Whatever the film, there’s an adolescent thrill in viewing the forbidden. For my schoolyard friends, it was Alien and Predator, which they recounted scene by scene for my jealous ears. For me, it was Timecop, an old VHS cassette pulled down from the shelf because my dad had talked up this one scene where Jean-Claude Van Damme did the splits over a pool of electrified water. Instead, I got an eyeful of him doing the splits over Ferris Bueller’s old girlfriend. So that’s how it is in their family.

And that’s what Ferox is all about. Mimicking the Italian cannibal exploitation genre that was so bizarrely prominent in the ’70s and ’80s, it arrives in a shoddy cardboard box, sports a “Be Kind, Please Rewind” sticker, and overfloweth with gory images of grisly massacres, angry twentysomethings embracing the horrors of desperate survival, and lots and lots of skulls and blood spatters. Just opening it, a part of me reflexively checked over my shoulder to make sure my parents hadn’t come home early from the symphony.

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