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CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
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!
The Package
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.
The Story
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
with the pointed query “I wonder who the real
cannibals are?”
The Direction
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”.
Vital Statistics
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