R.I.P. Robert Kerman: ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ Actor Passes Away at 71

We are saddened to learn of the passing of actor Robert Kerman.

Kerman had an extensive career in the adult film industry in the 1970s and 80s including appearances in the Debbie Does Dallas series, but he is perhaps best known for his roles in three of the most infamous cannibal movies produced in Italy in the 1980s. The first was Ruggero Deodato’s controversial 1980 jungle adventure Cannibal Holocaust. The film takes place mainly in South America, where Professor Harold Monroe (Kerman) is tasked with traveling through the dangerous Amazon jungle to retrieve some lost footage belonging to a group of documentary filmmakers who had disappeared in the months prior.

The second was Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive! (1980), in which Kerman played a Vietnam vet named Mark Butler who is hired by Janet Agren to help locate her missing sister in the jungles of New Guinea. There they must fend off a fierce cannibal tribe and a cult leader inspired by Jim Jones.

The third and final of Robert Kerman’s cannibal films was Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981). Unlike the two previous efforts, Kerman’s scenes are limited to the city where he plays a New York cop investigating the murder of a young man and the disappearance of a drug dealer who had fled into the South American jungle.

Robert Kerman would later go on to a number of TV appearances and cameos in more mainstream films such as Night of the Creeps (1986) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002).