A scene from the 1973 Canadian horror flick Cannibal Girls, which starred a pre-SCTV Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. (Films We Like)

Canada occupies an interesting place in the annals of horror cinema. In 1974, a Canadian film, Bob Clark's Black Christmas upended the horror flick boilerplate, inaugurating the era of the slasher film. But before Clark set a wheezing prowler loose on the University of Toronto campus to stalk and stab a group of sorority sisters, another Canadian filmmaker was carving out his own humble beginnings, plying his trade as a purveyor of cheaper thrills.

Cannibal Girls is a formative feature in the canon of films known as "Canuxploitation" cinema.

Released in 1973, Cannibal Girls features a hirsute Eugene Levy and a ditzy Andrea Martin (both pre-SCTV fame) stumbling into a rural town on a lovers' sojourn. Stranded in the isolated Ontario burgh of Farnhamville, the two twentysomethings slip into the sort of small-town conspiracy common in British horror films. If the film's title isn't a giveaway, suffice it to say there's something shady going on with Farnhamville's meat supply.

Cannibal Girls orbits around a charismatic hotelier named Reverend Alex St. John (Ronald Ulrich, looking like a cross between Charles Manson and Dr. Caligari), who beguiles buxom young women into killing and then ceremonially devouring their sex-starved suitors.

(Films We Like)

Charming, inadvertently goofy and plenty gory, Cannibal Girls raised the curtain not only on the careers of stars Levy and Martin, but on its director, Ivan Reitman, who would go on to direct the seminal Canadian comedy film Meatballs (1979) before charting a course due south to helm Stripes, Ghostbusters, Kindergarten Cop and many of the more memorable American comedies of the last 30 years.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into northern Ontario, Cannibal Girls is being groomed for a limited North American theatrical run, followed by a re-release on DVD and Blu-Ray. Appropriately enough, the remastering and distribution of Reitman's Can-Con cult classic is being overseen by another darling of Canadian cult cinema: iconoclastic Toronto filmmaker and documentarian Ron Mann.

Mann has endeared himself to comic nerds, stoners and motorheads with docs like Comic Book Confidential, Tales of the Rat Fink, Grass and the recent Know Your Mushrooms. He is using his Toronto-based distribution company FilmsWeLike to preserve the oddball legacy of Cannibal Girls.

"The dominant distribution [model] is for films like, well, Bruce Willis movies," says Mann. "We are the alternative. We're a boutique distributor that picks up a handful of specialty films and tries to ensure that they reach an audience."

Since minting FilmsWeLike in 2003, Mann and veteran Toronto rock promoter Gary Topp have played an invaluable role in seeing that more esoteric films from around the globe reach Canadian audiences.

In the last year, FilmsWeLike has distributed rockumentaries about Neil Young and the White Stripes, Chinese art-house imports (like Jia Zhang Ke's 24 City), and a critically lauded Romanian crime comedy (Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective). But the warts-and-all artlessness of Cannibal Girls seems a different beast altogether.

Considering the film's slapdash plotting, wonky editing and at times wooden performances, calling Cannibal Girls a Canadian classic — as Mann and scads of other fans are wont to do — seems curious. While it may not possess artistic cachet, Cannibal Girls is undoubtedly a film of enduring interest, a formative feature in the loose canon of films often lumped under the category of "Canuxploitation" cinema.

Roughly defined, Canuxploitation refers to a bunch of genre movies (horror, sci-fi, Porky's-style sex romps) that have in one way or another tried to pass as their bigger-budgeted American counterparts, jettisoning artistry for sleaze, shock cuts and other, more exploitative pleasures. Whether campy horror films like 1975's The Clown Murders (featuring a very young John Candy), early Cronenberg splatter flicks like 1979's The Brood, or broad sex comedies in the vein of the Al Waxman-directed My Pleasure Is My Business (1974), there seems to be only one criteria for inclusion in Canuxploitation canon: the cheaper (and cheesier), the better.

Veteran filmmaker Ivan Reitman got his start directing Cannibal Girls. (Toby Canham/Getty Images)

Cannibal Girls embodies the identity crisis at the heart of the Canuxploitation genre. Equal parts slasher film, winking comedy, soft-core porno and Gothic spookfest, Cannibal Girls represents the attempts of Canadian filmmakers in the 1970s and '80s to ape the saleable styles of American midnight movie fare. It was an era Mann quixotically refers to as Canada's "wonderful period of grindhouse films."

It's at times tempting to regard Cannibal Girls as a spoof of more traditional and more legitimately scary horror films, but if the film's daffy B-movie excesses weren't enough to certify its cult credibility, Cannibal Girls may be best remembered for one especially conspicuous genre-film gimmick that accompanied its original theatrical release.

When Reitman's film was picked up by U.S. distributor American International Pictures, producer Roger Corman — the so-called "King" of B-movies — added a warning bell sound effect to the soundtrack as a way of alerting more delicate viewers to an impending sequence of particular horror. Theatrical posters trumpeted Cannibal Girls as "The Film With the Warning Bell! When It Rings, Close Your Eyes — If You're Squeamish!"

To contemporary horror viewers acclimatized to the unflinching torture porn of films like Saw and Hostel, such an intervention is more likely to elicit giggles than squirms. But to an audience just as comfortable with viewing films through the rose-tinted lenses of "so bad it's good," Cannibal Girls' restored warning bell only adds to the film's schlocky silliness. It's also proof of the efforts Mann and his team went to preserve this seminal Canadian genre film.

"We have more people asking about Cannibal Girls than any other movie in our entire catalogue," says Mann. "It's just mind-blowing." For generations of fans resigned to viewing Reitman's breakout feature on well-worn VHS bootlegs, the remastered Cannibal Girls proves the perfect opportunity to reconnect with a Canuxploitation classic. And when you hear that tell-tale warning bell — well, try not to laugh.

Cannibal Girls will play Edmonton April 17-19. For updates about screenings and the DVD/Blu-Ray release, check out the FilmsWeLike web page.

John Semley is a writer based in Toronto.