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This hugely controversial exploitation epic is easily the best of the
Italian cannibal movies of the late seventies and early eighties.
It’s also one of the most repellant, disturbing and morally repugnant
films ever made. To use an
outmoded but entirely appropriate cliché: You
have been warned!
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CANNIBAL
HOLOCAUST marked the start of the Italian cannibal-exploitation movie cycle,
even though it wasn’t the first such film.
That distinction is usually accorded to Umberto Lenzi’s THE MAN FROM
DEEP RIVER (1972), which was followed by Ruggero Deodato’s JUNGLE HOLOCAUST
(1977). That film is now viewed as
a sort of dry run for the seminal CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, directed by Deodato and
sporadically released in 1980. Unsurprisingly,
it was heavily banned and led Deodato into a three-year court battle based on
entirely justifiable charges of animal cruelty.
Animal
cruelty is something the film contains in abundance.
It’s an element of all the subsequent cannibal movies (about which I
understand the famed graphic artist/film critic Steven R. Bissette has written
an entire book, although it doesn’t appear to be in print anywhere).
They include EMERALD JUNGLE (1980), CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) and MASSACRE
IN DINOSAUR VALLEY (1985). All
replicate CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’S premise: white people traipse into the Amazon,
terrorize the “savage” inhabitants and eventually become the main course in
a cannibal banquet. But none of
those subsequent programmers contain a shade of the gut level nastiness or
filmmaking savvy of Deodato’s film, which anticipated the mock documentary
format popular in modern indies with its film-within-a-film framework.
That latter aspect, incidentally, was used in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT,
although its makers strenuously deny any connection (right!).
In
the end such an accomplishment, vile though it may be, will always be a rarity.
There’s never been another film quite like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, despite
the attempts of so many filmmakers to imitate it, and nor has Deodato ever been
able to recapture its power. His
subsequent efforts include the limp slasher flicks BODY COUNT (1987) and DIAL
HELP (1988), and the gory jungle adventure CUT AND RUN (1985), which outside
some potent grue has little worth recommending.
CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is almost certainly his masterpiece, although I’m
fully aware that “masterpiece” is an entirely subjective term when applied
to a movie like this.
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The
esteemed Professor Monroe is investigating the disappearance of a documentary
film crew in the wilds of the Amazon. Monroe
flies into the “Green Inferno” with his own crew, to the area the missing
filmmakers were exploring. There
they happen upon the People of the Trees, a cannibal tribe whose activities
include sticking a spiked mudball up a woman’s vagina as punishment for
adultery. One of Monroe’s
crewmembers disembowels a muskrat and feeds its ripped-out stomach to an Amazon
they’ve taken captive, but this does nothing to endear Monroe or his
companions to the natives. Eventually
Monroe elects to strip naked, which goes a long way toward improving relations
with the cannibals. They direct
him to four stripped-clean skeletons that once housed the brains, innards and
skin of the missing film crew, and hand over the film they shot.
Back
in New York Monroe screens the exposed film, which has been pieced together by
an editor. The footage,
scratched-up and grainy, shows the four filmmakers--three men and a
woman--loose in the same Amazon locations Monroe investigated.
There they sadistically rip apart a turtle so they can feast on its
innards and torment the native inhabitants by burning down their village (and
having sex in the embers!). They also stage a makeshift abortion in which a pregnant woman
is tied spread-eagled, has her child ripped from her womb and then is beaten to
death. And that’s not all: the
three male filmmakers gang rape a native woman in a mud pit and happen upon the
corpse of a woman (the same?) impaled by a long stake stuck through her vagina
and out her mouth. After this the
Tree People invade, and the intrepid moviemakers meet their collective end in
an all-out cannibal chowdown with all the trimmings: scalping, head lopping,
penis whacking and intestine pulling.
There
the footage ends. Professor Monroe
orders the film burned and leaves the screening room with the pointed query “I
wonder who the real cannibals are?”
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You
might object to CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST on moral grounds (and it does contain more
than its share of objections in that area), but it was undeniably made with
great skill. The faux documentary
contained within the film was fashioned long before the mock-doc format became
popular (in CLOVERFIELD, DIARY OF THE DEAD and the above-mentioned BLAIR WITCH
PROJECT), and is ingeniously carried off by Ruggero Deodato, who includes
manufactured scratches, lens flares, snatches of blank film and a sense of
brutal realism worthy of the Italian neorealist classics of Roberto Rossellini,
for whom Deodato worked as an assistant for many years.
(The only drawbacks are the tacky music cues--the dramatic
rationalization for their presence, that the onscreen editor overlaid the rough
documentary footage with “stock music”, is a lame one).
It all builds to an unforgettable crescendo of insanity and mutilation
that will impact even the most hardened viewers.
There’s
lots of grue on display, but in keeping with Deodato’s staunch reality-based
aesthetic, none of it is ever pleasurable in the least bit, even for an
admitted gorehound like myself. Indeed, the bloodletting is downright unpleasant,
particularly in the real-life animal mutilations, which rival those of the
“Mondo” shockumentaries of the sixties for sheer vileness.
Deodato’s
aim here, despite seemingly lofty intentions, was first and foremost to shock.
CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is unadulterated exploitation above all else, and one
of the most potent such films ever made--it is truly, as the Grindhouse
Releasing DVD cover proclaims, “The One
That Goes All The Way”.
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CANNIBAL
HOLOCAUST
F.D.
Cinematografica/Grindhouse Releasing
Director:
Ruggero Deodato
Producers: Franco Di Nunzio, Franco Palaggi
Screenplay: Gianfranco Clerici
Cinematography: Sergio D’Offizi
Editing: Vincenzo Tomassi
Cast:
Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi, Salvatore
Basile, Ricardo Fuentes, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Paolo Paoloni, Lionello Pio Di
Savoia, Luigina Rocchi, Lucia Costantini, Ruggero Deodato, Enrico Papa
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