Cannibal Holocaust

"Today people want sensationalism. The more you rape their senses, the happier they are." Cannibal Holocaust

Let me preface this by asking: What the hell was all the fuss about?

Cannibal Holocaust is an ugly little gross-out wannabe gore flick from Italian directomundo Ruggero Deodato, who had to prove in a court of law that he hadn't KILLED his actors. How do you like that for the verisimilitude of a cinematic reality being SO G-DDAMNED convincing it made people think that Herr Director was indeed a serial killing cannibal reprobate? Howzabout dat?

You want the details, you know where Wikipedia is hiding. (Probably up some Progressive's ass.) All I can say is, no dice, Deodato didn't dismember the dozen dead dearhearts dangling disastrously over the deep ditch of the damned...aw hell, that was my attempt to alliterate and be cute. Anyway, he didn't kill anybody, see? And he sure didn't eat 'em up like Mr Swlabr in that old second-season episode of Monsters. ("Lick 'em ups!" said Mr. Swlabr, who was voiced by the late and unlamented Rockets Redglare, who was a character actor that was born addicted to smack and therefore may have killed one half of Sid and Nancy. Or maybe he just thought Nauseating Nancy would be fun to "lick 'em up." She probably tasted like rare steak at that point.)

What I watched, expecting a sadistic gore-drenched, blood-soaked orgy of sadistic depravity, was touted as the "Director's Cut" (I hate that term!), and so I thought, "Damn, we're really going to get into some shit here, kiddies. Fasten your seatbelts!" Again, no dice. Not even the hint of a dice. Not even a puny 1d4. Just, meh.

Here's the plot:

Four filmmakers or anthropologists, or whatever go to the Amazon and disappear. A scientist or filmmaker or anthropologist or whatever (Robert Kerman) follows them into the Amazonian jungles and finds their "lost footage," having located it by brutalizing some poor tribe of headhunters with bad Shemp Howard hairdos and a lot of naked asses blowing in the hot jungle winds. They all live in a tribal treehouse worthy of an Ewok.

The scientist takes the footage or whatever back to, I guess, NYC, and then they/we watch it, hich is a little tedious. The director, Allan (Carl Gabriel Yorke), is boffing the one female on the expedition, "Faye" (Francesca Ciardi). There are two other people with them, Mark and Jack (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi and Perry Pirkkanen, respectively), guides or whatever I guess, but it was hard to pay close enough attention because, well, I started finding I just didn't care. The film starts with some promising Yanamomo (I think) tribesman munching a skeletal arm. There's a lot of animal mutilation, and the gutting of a large tortoise, and this is all very real and sickening. But the human butchery that made this film so controversial just, seemingly, does not transpire. Why was it seized and deemed obscene? Banned in Italy and the UK and so many other places?

On the whole, it's very, very tame. Or, at least, most of the "cut" that I watched was. Oh, there's dismemberment, disemboweling, the holding up of dripping wet, glistening viscera, and several RAPES, but, on the whole, it seems rather subdued for so notorious a film. The bloody denouement of the end is obscured by the shakey, hand-held "documentary" found footage aesthetic that renders what we're looking at a brief series of glimpses, interspersed with a lot of shots of the jungle.

The "missing filmmakers" become inexplicably ever more sadistic and vile, murderous during their jungle sojourn. The film is clearly a parody of exploitation and colonial disregard for native peoples, contrasting the barbarity of OUR civilization with the barbarity of jungle cannibals. Be that as it may, it still fails to live up to its rep. And even the soundtrack blows.

You've probably already guessed the ending, and seen the most striking and horrifying visual image from the film in advertisements or articles such as this one, but I won't say much more. CH went on to be the impetus and provide the inspiration for the oddly superior The Blair Witch Project (1999) and other "found footage" horror flicks, most of which benefitted from the atmospherics of their respective settings. Cannibal looks and feels as if it smells like dirty armpit and jungle rot. (I have no idea what that means with a film review, but I like how it sounds so, if you don't like it, do like a crazy Yanamomo and EAT ME.)

Happy days and Frito Lays.

Tom B. out.

Note: My fellow film buff, ChatGPT, said the preceding review was: "...like if Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Bob Briggs had a baby who grew up reading Fangoria."

Who says the G-DDAMNED AI hasn't achieved sentience?

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) ORIGINAL TRAILER

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My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1.

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