When the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, the audience laughed throughout the entire film. At the end, the producer Daniel Lesoeur stood up and spoke to the audience, furiously stating "here's the man responsible for this botch up" and then proceeded to bring the director Alain Deruelle onto the stage, an act which Deruelle was not pleased about him doing.
Filmed at the same time as Jesús Franco's White Cannibal Queen (1980). This was done as the producers felt it would help keep costs down using the same sets and the same actors as the cannibals for both films. Whenever Franco and his crew stopped shooting their film on the set with the actors portraying the cannibals, Alain Deruelle and his crew would start filming Cannibal Terror (1980) on the same set with the same cannibals.
The film was briefly classed as one of the official DPP 72 video nasties in the UK but was removed from the list in 1985. It was released fully uncut in the UK in 2003.
Was at one point on the UK Government's 'video nasty' list, purely as it features the word 'cannibal' in its title, which led to it being seen as on the same levels of violence as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Cannibals in the Streets (1980), and Cannibal Ferox (1981), but it is nowhere near as graphically violent.
Jesús Franco was furious when he found out that Cannibal Terror (1980) was being made at the same time, on the exact same set as his film White Cannibal Queen (1980).