CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST

1980

Directed by Ruggerio Deodato

A.K.A. Let's try to shock the audience!

WARNING! The Following Movie Features Very Real Scenes of Animal Cruelty. Viewer Discretion is Advised. Plot Professor Harold Monroe is an anthropologist who has been charged with finding a crew of four young documentarians who travelled off into the Amazon to make a film about cannibalism and savagery in modern times. That, or he at least needs to find out what happened to them. We then see some tribesmen battle some guerillas in the jungle, but nothing too graphic is shown--just yet. The first warning signs that this isn't a film for the squeamish come rather suddenly, and aren't really all that much of a warning anyways. One of Monroe's guides finds and catches a muskrat, presumably for dinner. He then proceeds to graphically maim it alive on screen. This is no trick or special effect. The muskrat is very real, as is all of its pointless suffering. Welcome to the world of the Italian Cannibal film. Monroe and his guides come across, in secret, a local performing some sort of ritual murder on a girl. He appears to rape her with a very large stone, and then bludgeon her to death with it. Apparently body purity is important to these people. The explorers remain hidden to avoid the catastrophic repercutions their interruptions would cause. Later they capture a tribesman and use him as a bartering chip to gain safe access to the tribal village. This tribe seems mostly peaceful, and the team gain the cheif's trust by giving him a switch blade, and showing him how to make it "magically" come out. When pressed, the villagers remain suspiciously quiet about the filmmakers, despite proof that the four were in fact there. The people indicate that the people had pressed on deeper into the jungle, searching for the legendary "Yamamomos", a far more dangerous tribe. When the team finally reaches the Yamamomos, there's much trepidation on both parties' parts. Eventually Monroe gets the idea that if he shows them his own, naked human body bathing, they may start to trust that he's just another man like them. Quite quickly into the experiment, about a half dozen girls come running out of the bushes to join in his bath, and start curiously poking and prodding at him, before running off giggling. He follows, in good spirits himself, until he finds them bowing to a recently made alter. The alter is clearly made from the bodies of the film crew. To top things off, in spite of all the other keepsakes stolen from the corpses, the film cans are still tightly gripped by the rotting, non-shambling corpses. Fed up with this savagery, Monroe uses some of his "white man magic" and plays a tape recording of the Yamamomo's witch doctor in a ritual chant. Apparently the chant had said some good stuff, because the tribe all come out in smiles and invite him for dinner...which happens to be one of the members of the other tribe, uncooked. D'oh! Later, Monroe has returned to the steel towers of New York, and screens the footage. His supervisors insist they air it on their television channel, but Monroe insists that it's a bad idea. In case you couldn't predict it, we're about to see why. Our four "brave" documentary makers (three men, one woman. None of whom seem camera shy while naked, btw) are the sort of filmmakers who make the documentaries that show what they want to show, regardless of how the finished product is actually accomplished. All fresh faced and smiles, they their guide set off into the Green Hell. It doesn't take long for tragedy to strike. The guide, who's obviously not a very good one, puts on his boots without checking them first. He ends up with a foot full of snakebites. The gang tries to stop the venom infection by chopping off his leg, but they're too slow. After burying him on the spot, they decide in a rather cavalier fashion to go on alone. We then get some nature scenes to cement in our minds the sort of people the filmmakers are. At one point they catch a large turtle in the river. Once again, in very real footage, we see a brutal animal murder. The kids mutilate the Turtle, and at one point force its reflexively active head to eat its own flesh. Nope, no symbolism there whatsoever. Later, while crossing a river, a cayman (something not unlike a crocodile to you laymen) comes in after them. The member pushing the raft shouts "Don't worry about me, just keep filming!" That's right, the film/prestige is more valuble than their own lives. Eventually they get to the huts of the first tribe and film stuff like a woman getting a forced abortion (Like I said, body purity is sacred to these folks) and murdered. Then, because they need more shocking footage, they burn down a hut, with people still inside, staging it to be the actions of the fabled Yamamomos. The girl and her fiance even have the gaul to have sex in the rubble afterwards while the tribesmen cower in fear. No wonder they were reluctant to mention them. After that pleasant visit, they eventually find a Yamamomo girl and for no damn reason decide it would be fun to gang-rape her. The girl on the team complains about the event solely because she thinks it's a waste of film. If you look behind her, you can see a Yamamomo tribesman hiding in the grass watching them... Later, they find the same girl impaled from her vagina to her mouth on a large spike (purity of body...) It's a good effect, and my wife thought for a moment they had impaled a real corpse to pull it off, instead of a complicated variation on the old "arrow-through-the-head" gag. It's not long after this act of depravity that the Yamamomos come in for revenge... Well. While I can understand why this film is so controversial, I just wasn't that disturbed. Maybe there's something wrong with me, as I watch all these notoriously gruesome films and come out of them usually thinking "THAT whas what all the fuss was about?!" Then again, I did find that the animal cruely was disgusting and repugnant on a moral level, though not a lot more than your average episode of "Animal Precinct"... On the other hand, I do respect Deodato for the artistic ideas he was trying to set forth with this. You see, the actors playing the filmmakers signed a deal where they ahd to basically go into hiding, staying out of the public eye. This was because the film was marketed as if the "lost" footage was in fact very real that the four unknowns were the ones shooting the filming of their sequences themselves, and had in fact been cannibalized. I have to admit that had I seen this film cold with no idea of the backstory, I would have believed it. The film was made right at the tail-end of the Italian "Mondo" film craze, which entailed documentaries of the weird and disturbing aspects of our world, the most famous being "Mondo Cane" (literally translated: A Dog's world.) Much like in this film, most of the footage in the Mondo films were in fact staged for the camera, with the animal deaths all being quite real. The surreal "Welcome Back Uncle Tom" was possibly the pinnacle of the genre, wherein the filmmakers actually claimed to go back in time and film footage of life on a plantation! Also the obviously real violence towards animals in this film suggested that the violence towards the people was real as well. The illusion isn't hurt by the rather realistic effects that we do see (possibly the technical highpoint of the film,) or the shakey, obscured handheld scenes, meant to be shot by the participants. If it weren't for the offensivness of the content, I imagine that Deodato would have been a more well-known director. Oh, and also if this were more widely seen, all the points people make about the originality of "The Blair Witch Project" would be moot, as it totally rips the idea of this film off.

Rating I give Cannibal Holocaust: Two and a Half Rotting Shambling Corpses out of Five. If I had seen the "U.K. cut" of the film with the animal footage excised, I wouldn't be surprised if I gave it a higher rating.

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