Cannibal Holocaust

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.

I am not going to sit here and type out the reasons why this is not only the best Cannibal film ever made, one of the best horror films ever made, and basically just a damn good film. If you're reading one of the thousands of Cannibal Holocaust reviews on here; chances are you've seen it, and know why it is such a masterly structured and excellently made film. And therefore you don't need me to tell you why it is.

Suffice to say that this film is simply stunning. The music, direction, camerawork, plot and atmosphere are practically faultless, and I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of horror, or a fan of well made, and clever films.

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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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.