En el infierno caníbal

This film is notorious for its intense scenes of graphic violence and real animal killings, it really aims to challenge us with the exploration into cultural imperialism and the depths of human depravity.

This film stands out from other horrors through its fearless exploration of ethical boundaries in film making, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The story unfolds with such a raw and unflinching intensity that it really had me questioning the authenticity of the film especially knowing going in about the already existing animal ethical concerns. It does not hold back in its depiction of violence and brutality so a strong warning for those that cannot stand gore. Still however this remains a cult classic for anyone willing to explore such disturbing themes.

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.

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.

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.

"Cannibal Holocaust" is not the campy little horror flick I expected. It's a "serious" and well-made movie and it's an experience you'll hardly ever forget. According to IMDb's trivia section the movie can "only be seen completely uncut in the EC-UltraBit DVD", which means that I've seen a tamed down version and that, my friends, is insane! "Cannibal Holocaust" is easily one of the most graphic movies I've ever come across. The violence is incredibly realistic. It's no wonder that director Ruggero Deodato was taken to court to prove that he hasn't slain real people for his motion picture. (I still think the real animal slaughtering in the movie was unnecessary. Screw you for that, Deodato!) It's hard to tell if there really is a message or if the "moral" is just an excuse for all the gore. In a strange way the violent scenes somehow speak for themselves and do deliver some kind of message, but that's open for discussion.

If ever a movie deserved the label "disturbing", it's "Cannibal Holocaust". It's controversial, but totally worth watching, if you can take some seriously sick images.