Nackt und zerfleischt

The second word in the title is important. Ruggero Deodato's 1979 meta-snuff movie, far more than a chichi trinket like THE NIGHT PORTER, is the real Holocaust porn. Here the trigger is not frights, or even shocks, or even splatter. Atrocity is the name of Deodato's game--and the genius of this monsterpiece is that Deodato horrifyingly delivers the goods at the same time he coruscates his audience and himself.

This is a hard movie to recommend to any but those who would find it anyway; but it must be said that Deodato here created the most rigorous, critical, almost philosophical movie in the Italian horror canon. The audience's lust for Third World exoticism and envelope-pushing violence are gratified and held up to the painful light of day--and not necessarily in that order. The overwhelming feeling of this picture is of a pornographer pleading, "Stop me before I shoot again."

The conceit of the movie--an academic's journey into the Amazon to find the remains of a Western film crew devoured by cannibals--permits Deodato more Pirandellian boxes within boxes than a double bill of BLOWUP and THE PLAYER. But the atmosphere of the movie, despite scenes of cruelty so extreme you sometimes want to put out your eyeballs, is relentlessly elegiac--capped by Riz Ortolani's theme music. (It can be said with certainty that no romantic ballad was ever used underneath what Deodato stages here.)

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is the farthest edge of Extreme Cinema--as in Extreme Sports. It feels stuntlike, yet the combination of amplified bloodlust and world-weary regret is unique. Like Lucio Fulci's even more personal CAT IN THE BRAIN, it's an affecting enactment of an exploitation artist's conscience tearing apart.

It might make good viewing for Y2K Eve: it puts together the century's two salient words--holocaust and entertainment--as no other film did before or since.

This movie could have easily been a 9 or a 10 because it is truly a disturbing masterpiece and really makes you think about what we consider civilized. The reason I'm rating it so low is that it is ridiculous that the animal slaughters were done using live animals, (7 animals were killed in the making of this video, though only 6 are shown) which was completely unnecessary as they clearly had the skills to depict realistic murder/slaughter/rape/gore scenes as shown by all the gruesome events featuring humans. The only good thing to come out of this is that very few movies afterwards ever used real animals becausr of all the backlash this one received.

A group of documentarians go into the Amazon to film warring cannibal tribes. Unfortunately for them, they don't make it back. An anthropologist is sent in to find them, and is horrified when he sees the grisly images they captured on film.

Let me make a confession. Despite being a serious horror fan and having met Ruggero Deodato twice, engaging in some interesting conversation with him, I had never seen "Cannibal Holocaust" before. I had a fairly good idea of what to expect from it, as I was familiar with Umberto Lenzi's "Cannibal Ferox", which I suspected was quite similar (something I suspected correctly). But I think it's safe to say Deodato went further than Lenzi's imitation did.

Starring Robert Kerman (perhaps better known for his many pornographic films), it's not surprising that this film pushes the boundaries on nudity and cruelty. Men and women naked, some of them sexually brutalized... animals killed, including a monkey who gets his face cut off and the infamous "turtle scene". I was actually somewhat disturbed by this film -- at the very least, rather uncomfortable. One scene where an adulteress is punished was particularly disturbing for me.

I don't think those of you who are squeamish will want to see this one... or those who don't like seeing animals killed (yes, Virginia, the animals killed on screen)... but if you want to see a horror film with some sense of reality in it, this is it. There's also a strong social commentary in it about what makes man civilized or not, but I won't get into that... you'll see it.

Cannibal Holocaust was, first and foremost, a disgusting movie with more violence than I have ever seen. Despite this, it is also one of my favorite movies. It gives a feeling of Blair Witch done right, even though there are some very obviously contrived scenes in which nobody is holding the camera, but despite some small cosmetic problems this is the best horror movie I have ever seen.

Unlike most "shock" films, such as the Guinea Pig movies, Cannibal Holocaust has a very well written plot and a definite progression. The focus is still on making the audience ill, but we don't even see any violence until fairly late in the movie, so the emphasis on plot is much stronger. The story told is a deep one, showing the lengths at which people will go for some goal, the example given being fame and fortune. The theme is reflected in parallel story lines through the second half of the movie, as Alan and his crew go to more and more desperate lengths for fame, and the professor struggles against a big media company to suppress the release of their footage. Even in a "meta" sense, we see the theme appear once again in the lengths the director of Cannibal Holocaust itself went, going so far as to kill and butcher four animals on camera.

It's impossible to talk about Cannibal Holocaust without mentioning The Blair Witch Project. Blair Witch is (wrongly) labelled as 'inventing' the 'found footage' genre, when, in fact it simply 'rebooted' it. Cannibal Holocaust did it almost twenty years previous.

We hear at the beginning how four young film-makers travelled deep into the jungle, only to never be heard from again. A professor, curious as to their fate, retraces their path and finds their footage. What you have here is two stories in one. You have the more 'traditional' Hollywood story-telling of the professor talking to TV executives about showing the found footage on network television and the footage which was retrieved from the jungles (first person, ala Blair Witch).

I only got to see the edited UK version of this film, but the footage, both from the professor who follows them and the film-makers themselves remains as shocking today as it was at the time. Cannibal Holocaust was banned at the time of release and even had claims of being a 'stuff' film (i.e. one where real people are killed on camera). This maybe untrue, but viewers should be warned that, although the people who die are all just covered in fake blood and prosthetics, REAL animals were killed for the making of the film. Those with strong views on this may wish to steer clear.

However, the animal cruelty is only fleeting. What you have are pretty strong scenes of torture which make the Hostel franchise seem tame in comparison. The footage, being shot in the eighties and on 'non professional' cameras, gives the film a deliberately 'raw' feel about it which even the Blair Witch Project can't even match. Plus you have the music which is both creepy and tranquil at the same time.

As you have probably guessed, the film-makers (on film) meet a grisly end at the hands (and teeth, obviously) of the cannibals in the jungle. Although, where we probably felt sorry for those behind the camera in Blair Witch and other such films, here the film-makers were pretty horrible. Some may see that they got what they deserved.

It's hard to 'enjoy' this film in a traditional viewing sense. Yet it remains a deserved lynchpin in the horror genre's history.

Bottom line: for those with strong stomachs ONLY.

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