CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980)

Studio:       Grindhouse Releasing
Director:    Ruggero Deodato
Writer:       Gianfranco Clerici
Producer:  Franco Palaggi
Stars:     Robert Kerman, Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Giorgio Barbareschi.

Review Score:

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Summary:

When a group of documentary filmmakers goes missing in the Amazon, an anthropologist recovers their footage to discover how they met their grisly demise.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Four American filmmakers travel to “The Green Inferno” of the Amazon to make a documentary on tribal life in the jungle. The crew consists of: Alan Yates – director, Faye Daniels – his girlfriend and script girl, Jack Anders and Mark Tommaso – cameramen and inseparable friends. After they set out, two months goes by without anyone hearing from them.

New York University and the Pan-American Broadcasting System sponsor a rescue. Professor Harold Monroe, an anthropologist, agrees to look for the missing film crew.

A guerrilla team ambushes a jungle tribe and takes a hostage. Monroe meets with the military team to arrange an expedition. Chaco and Miguel are to be his two guides. With the hostage tribesman in tow, they set off for the territory where two tribes are at war: the tree-dwelling Yanomamo and the swamp-dwelling Shamatari. They find the skeleton of a tracker in the jungle. Miguel kills a muskrat for food. Chaco does cocaine with his hostage. From afar, they next watch a tribesman ceremonially punish a woman for adultery by raping her with a phallus before bludgeoning her to death. They follow the tribesman’s trail towards his village. Miguel strips naked and enters a clearing with the hostage to draw out the Yacumo tribe. Chaco explains that they will welcome them to their village in exchange for the hostage.

The group heads to the village where Monroe sees one woman wearing a film can around her neck. Monroe witnesses some of their practices before moving deeper into the jungle. They witness Shamatari using smoke and fire to flush Yanomamo from the trees. The tribe then rapes and mutilates their captives by a river. Monroe’s group intervenes and shoots several Shamatari attackers to gain the trust of the Yanomamo. They behave with fear towards the outsiders, but Monroe’s team is still allowed to witness their rituals. Monroe gains their trust by bathing naked in a river and follows the tribe’s women to a shrine made from the grisly remains of the four filmmakers. Monroe is not allowed to bury the skeletons because they are meant to chase away the evil spirits that the dead represented.

Monroe uses his tape recorder to play tribal chants, which impresses the tribe. This earns his group a dinner invite where human flesh is the main course. Monroe exchanges the tape recorder for the film cans.

Back in New York, a TV network plans to use the footage for a special titled, “The Green Inferno.” Executives show Monroe the documentary “The Last Road to Hell” as an example of the dead film crew’s previous work, but tells him it was staged.

Monroe interviews family members and associates of the crew. He then begins reviewing the recovered film footage with the editor to learn about the documentary crew’s jungle journey. After traversing the jungle for some time, a giant turtle is slaughtered for food. Faye finds a giant spider crawling on her and one of the men kills it with a knife. Their guide is bitten by a snake and his infected leg is amputated before he dies. The four filmmakers elect to continue on their own.

They next film a tribe eating live monkey brains. They shoot at the tribe and Monroe notes that they seem to be treating the Yacumo tribe with hostility. The filmmakers intrude upon the village and start shooting their guns and chasing the tribe. Mark kicks a pig and shoots it. Trying to stage an attack by the Yanomamo for the benefit of their film, the crew sets fire to the huts. Alan and Faye have sex within view of the tribe.

Monroe disagrees with the TV producer about the value of the footage and asks who the real savages are. The next footage shows an old woman baking to death in the sun. Females from the tribe then perform a crude abortion on one woman and bury the baby in mud before stoning the woman. Alan shows a shrunken head to the camera.

Monroe tells the TV executives that the footage is reprehensible and he now refuses to be involved in the project. He convinces them to have a private screening of the footage they have not yet seen.

The three men of the crew are next seen gang raping a villager. A naked woman is then shown impaled on a large branch in the ground. Alan smiles before being reminded that he is on film. The crew is later surrounded by the tribe. When Jack is hit by a spear, Alan intentionally shoots him so they can film the Yacumo savaging his corpse. Jack is next seen with his eye out of its socket as his penis is sawn off. He is then torn apart and eaten. Faye is captured, gang raped, and clubbed to death before she is decapitated. Alan is then seen falling to the ground with blood pouring from his head. Mark is presumably killed, too. The TV executive orders that all of the footage be burned. Monroe leaves and asks himself, “I wonder who the real cannibals are.”

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Review:

Make no mistake.  “Cannibal Holocaust” is no joke.

I watched the film several weeks ago and am only now finally writing the review.  It has taken this long because I have had a genuine struggle with how best to approach it.  And also with how to interpret my own thoughts and feelings about the movie.

My appreciation of horror cinema was cultivated in an era when the teen years were occupied with tracking down elusive VHS tapes of movies read about in obscure Fangoria articles, but never found in the local video store.  For my generation, the unholy grail of forbidden mondo treasures was undoubtedly “Faces of Death.”  Having actually seen it gave you an elite status badge amongst the social cliques of burnouts and weirdos.

Like the disclaimers introducing an insane stunt that only make an adolescent want even more to “try this at home,” the tagline proclaiming “Faces of Death” as “banned in 40+ countries” increased its allure immediately to must-see status.  Had they known, my parents would probably forbid me to see it for fear of the film warping an impressionable adolescent mind.  What is the next most imperative status after “must-see?”  Whatever it is, “Faces of Death” had it.

Even in the 1980’s, “Faces of Death” was laughable.  Yes, there were genuine death scenes.  But the overall presentation and generous inclusion of clearly fabricated fatalities made it more of a romp than anything remotely poised to warp a brain.  Now it resides as a midnight movie cult classic that friends can see on a lark with a case of beer and good humor.

In contemporary times, “torture porn” has become so commonplace as to now be passé.  The bar for creating controversy with a film is much higher to reach.  A movie such as “Human Centipede” is more offensive for the concept rather than the film itself.  Actually seeing the portrayal of a human centipede onscreen was far less disturbing than what imaginations had exaggerated it to be beforehand.

When the DVD box art for “Cannibal Holocaust” touts it as “the most controversial movie ever made,” it is reasonable to think that the film is probably of the same ilk as “Faces of Death” or Human Centipede.”  That is, reviled more by those who have not seen it than those who have, with that ire directed at the thought of what the content might be rather than what it is.  Like its cinematic brethren, watching the film would be more of a perverse pleasure than it would be detrimentally damaging.

How naïve.

After a small film crew disappears while documenting tribal life in the Amazon, an anthropologist locates their footage and brings it back to the States.  He and the producers at a television station then review the recovered footage and discover atrocities committed not just by the cannibals who killed the filmmakers, but also committed by the filmmakers against the tribe.

“Cannibal Holocaust” is an unrelenting assault on the human senses.  Its effect scars itself so deep into the mind’s eye and beyond that it is nigh impossible to not think about its imagery for several days afterward, if not longer.

Changing times and contemporary attitudes may have mellowed the impact that depictions of simulated torture and cannibalism can have on a more sophisticated audience.  But something from the film that remains inarguably controversial, even decades later, is its genuine portrayal of animal slaughter.  Several live animals are killed onscreen in visually gruesome ways.  A pig is kicked before a gun blast fires through its head.  A machete slices through a monkey’s head so that its fresh brains can be consumed.  And, most disturbing of all, a giant turtle is decapitated before having its shell torn open as its innards wiggle and spill towards the jungle floor.

Suitably exposed to these authentic horrors, the brain is now conditioned for atrocities on a human scale.  Rape, abortion, castration, immolation, decapitation, decomposition, and of course, cannibalism all have their moments of infamy.  Some scenes are even set to a “love theme” so bizarre that I am not sure how I am intended to process the imagery.

The stories behind and around the production and release of “Cannibal Holocaust” are arguably more compelling than the film itself.  Director Ruggero Deodato was arrested after the Italian premiere on the presumption that he had successfully created and commercially distributed a real snuff film.  Dodging a sentence of life in prison required the filmmaker to produce the four main actors live and in person, as proof that he did not really film their cannibalistic murders.  Additionally, Deodato had to verify that an impalement special effect was exactly that, and not the body of a woman speared through both ends on a long, bloody pole.

Having seen such a ridiculously long list of horror movies in the last four decades, I thought, how realistic could a makeup effect from 1980 really be that the government of a major country would actually assume a man guilty of murder?  I will say this: The impaled woman is the single most impressive practical special effect I have ever seen in a motion picture.  After watching that scene, and the rest of the film, I no longer thought it entirely crazy that Italy had Deodato arrested and the film confiscated.

Supposedly, Deodato provided the court with photographic proof that the impaled woman was alive and well, and the effect was achieved by having her sit on a bicycle seat with a wood shaft in her mouth.  Until I see these pictures myself, I will always harbor some shred of doubt about their authenticity.  If it were ever revealed that Deodato fooled the court and that woman really was speared, I doubt it would shock me.  That is how realistic this scene is.

The reason why reviewing “Cannibal Holocaust” is such a challenge is because it is incredibly difficult to quantify its merit.  The film already has a secure place in horror film history.  It is widely considered to be the first “found footage” horror film, a genre that would not climb its peak until “The Blair Witch Project” resurrected the technique nearly 20 years later.  Imitated and emulated, “Holocaust” kickstarted a brief explosion of cannibal-centric films whose influence still reaches across 30+ years.  Eli Roth’s “The Green Inferno” is an admitted homage to the film.  Deodato even makes a cameo as, what else, an Italian cannibal in Roth’s “Hostel II.”

The ultimate question is, what is the film’s true value?  Be clear about one thing: “Cannibal Holocaust” is not entertainment.  At worst, it is exploitative cinema with no more laudable purpose than to intentionally shock and disgust.  At best, it is a clever political commentary that questions, does civility make one any less of a savage?  What the filmmakers do to the men and women of the Amazon is perhaps more reprehensible than what is done to them in return.  Do their actions warrant a deserved fate?  Am I no better if I want to see them eat their just desserts?  And perhaps most questionable, can horror depicted in a movie actually be “too real?”

There is a genuinely slippery slope that can be debated about Ruggero Deodato’s true intentions.  I will leave that discussion to more inclined minds.  I do not regret having seen “Cannibal Holocaust,” but I have no desire to revisit it.  Deviously genius or scandalously repulsive, I truly cannot tell.  Though something indisputable is that the movie aims to provoke a reactive response, and it succeeds in spades.  For better or for worse, its unsettling effect is undeniable.  Few films have the ability to brand such an indelible impact, and “Cannibal Holocaust” earns a spot at the top of that list, no matter what it may be worth.  After all, a horror movie is supposed to be horrific.  And “Cannibal Holocaust” is definitely that.

Review Score:  55

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