Cannibal Man

• The Spanish title is La semana del asesino, which translates to The Week of the Killer. There is zero cannibalism anywhere in the film. The English export title was pure exploitation marketing built around the word 'cannibal' to sell it as a Last House on the Left-style gut-cruncher.
• The film landed on the UK Director of Public Prosecutions' 1983 Video Nasties list, and critics and restoration historians (including exploitation-cinema authority Stephen Thrower, who covers the film in its Blu-ray retrospective) point to that misleading 'cannibal' title as the likely trigger, not anything actually onscreen. The movie is relatively chaste by Video Nasty standards.
• Director Eloy de la Iglesia was an openly gay member of the Spanish Communist Party making subversive work under Franco's censors. The Marcos-Nestor relationship smuggled a same-sex romance into a horror plot. Censors forced the two characters, originally written as teenagers, to be aged up, and a passionate kiss between them survives only as a silent deleted scene on the restored Blu-ray.
• Franco's censorship board demanded roughly 62 cuts before the film could play in Spanish theaters, stripping violence and sexual content. It didn't get a domestic release until 1974, two years after completion.
• The slaughterhouse scenes use real documentary footage of cattle being killed, animals strung up by the hind legs and throats cut, intercut with the fiction of Marcos's human victims, deliberately echoing Georges Franju's 1949 abattoir short Le sang des betes.
• Lead Vicente Parra was a popular romantic leading man in classical Spanish cinema, famous for playing King Alfonso XII, and was cast hard against that handsome, aristocratic image here as a barely literate proletarian killer.

The grinder is the whole point. Marcos kills for a paycheck all day, then feeds his own dead into the same industrial machine, making no distinction between cattle carcasses and human ones. The film argues that a society that turns men into meat-plant labor has already taught them that bodies are just product to be processed.

Nestor, the wealthy neighbor who watches Marcos from across the way and lures him to the nighttime pool, is the one person Marcos never kills. Read it as the class and desire he can't reach: everyone in Marcos's own poverty-stricken orbit gets ground up, but the man above him stays untouchable, an object of want rather than rage.

The body count is panic compounding, not bloodlust. Each murder exists only to bury the last one, the way a poor man with no margin for error covers a mistake by digging deeper. The horror is structural: he never chooses to be a killer, he just can't afford to stop.

There's no cannibal here, despite the title some distributor slapped on for the grindhouse crowd. Marcos works a Madrid slaughterhouse, killing for wages, until a stupid scuffle with a cabbie leaves a body on his hands. Panic does the rest. One corpse becomes two becomes a week's worth, each killing tied off by hauling the pieces to the meat plant's grinder. Across the way, the well-off neighbor Nestor watches, waits, and wants. What starts as butcher's horror curdles into a study of a poor man dissolving everyone close to him, one bone-meal vat at a time.