Being a lover and appreciator (is "appreciator" even a word? if not, it should be....it rolls off the tongue quite nicely) of horror and darkly-tinged film, it's only natural that, from time to time, I finish a movie feeling a bit dirty. In need of a shower. In need of a Disney experience, even. Because, you see, certain movies drip of depravity, of foulness, and while watching them, you can't help but ask yourself, "Why in the hell am I watching this, voluntarily? Is this giving me EZ-Pass to Hell by doing so? Does this make me a sick fuck for doing so?"
This doesn't happen very often with me, truthfully, perhaps because I've seen so much crazy shit on film that it takes tons to make me cringe and feel filthy as a spectator. But holy shit, I've never, never, ever felt as wrong as I just did while watching Cannibal Holocaust. Just the title alone should suggest just how wrong this movie is. But the title alone is miniscule indication of just how wrong it is.
It's a film that's been in banned in countless countries, and as far as I know, is even restricted from Blockbuster and other video chains. The only places to acquire it on DVD are like Netflix and Ebay-like websites. It's one I've read about and heard about for many years now, whether through the various horror sites I visit daily or whatever other horror fanboy shit I've been involved in. And I knew that I'd never be considered a true horror hound if I've never seen Cannibal Holocaust, raw and uncut.
And my god, all of the hype and controversy is deserved, tenfold. Twentyfold. Four-thousand-and-fiftyfold. It's one of those movies where you can't fully tell whether what you're watching is staged or just some snuff film footage wrongly released commercially (its fake, for the record, but damn if its not convincingly executed). Made back in 1979 9but released in 1980) by Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust is about a professor from NYU who is hired to find four 30-something documentarians who went to the Amazon Jungle's "Green Inferno" (an area where no White man has ever been able to survive and is inhabited by two savage cannibal tribes) and never were heard from again. So he goes there, links up with a grizzly tour guide and his equally-grizzly associate, and bravely enters the Green Inferno zone, where he makes good with the tribal folk and uncovers the crew's film cans next to their skeletal remains. Fun for the whole family, clearly.
The first half follows the professor and his journey, and then once he returns to the states with the film cans, the rest of Cannibal Holocaust is a mixture of his meetings with investors looking to release his findings as a documentary and the actual raw footage of the departed.
There are films that go off the deep end, and then there's Cannibal Holocaust, which is shot out of a Godzilla-sized slingshot and is hurled mailes over the deep end's line. Jesus, man. Nothing is left unseen. Everything from human sacrifice rituals to animal slayings are shown in all their wrong glory. The human murders aren't real, of course, but all of the animal slayings are, in fact, real. Yes, many an animal was hurt during the making of this film. A baby pig is shot in the had at point blank range. An overgrown turtle is dragged out of the water, laid out on its backshell, and decapitated, and then its limbs are all severed, and then its shell is smashed with a machete. A cute-little chimp's top-half-of-head is sliced off. And again, this is all shown, front and center.
And then there's what happens to some of the humans here. Honestly, a lot of this stuff, I couldn't even fully watch without looking away, cringing in disbelief and disgust. But like any good trainwreck, I couldn't totally step away. I had to make it to the finish line, here. For my own piece of mind. But man....one tribeswoman, assumed to have been sexually promiscous, is dragged through mud, then has an egg-shaped rock repeatedly, and violently, jammed through her you-know-what, and a clump of mud stuffed in her you-know-what, and then, just for good measure, she's bludgeoned to death by that egg-shaped rock. A guy is held against a tree by the tribesmen as his you-know-what is sliced off with a sharp rock, and then his limp body is eaten up.
Hmmm, what else....Oh yeah, how could I forget: a poor virginal tribesgirl is gang-raped by the three male documentarians, and then, since she's no longer pure, has a 10-or-so-foot spear jammed through her body, and this spear is then stood upright out in the open. Oh, and there's also the most vile abortion scene you could ever imagine, one I honestly don't even want to type out in written form. I'd rather just forget about it.
Although forgetting about anything I've just seen is pretty much impossible.
Do I feel proud for having watched this film? Call me sick or crazy, but hell yeah I do. Cannibal Holocaust isn't a film that should ever be critiqued, or reviewed in a traditional sense. I can't imagine anybody ever calling it a "great" or "superb" film; an important and groundbreaking one, sure. Both are valid. It's a film that can only be measured on how much the viewer(s) can endure; how much they can sit through. I made it through, from start to finish, so I shall pat myself on my back, no question.
But as I ponder it a bit more, I'm starting to grasp what Deodato may have intended here, the statements he aimed to get across, in brutal unflinching fashion. I eat chicken and steak and things that were once living, so why would I cringe as the tribespeople here do so, only while raw and five-seconds-after-breathing? It's all the same sense of savagery, in ways. Will I become a vegetarian now, though? Fuck no. I'm just saying....And then I can now comprehend the point Deodato seems to be making about the love of sensationalism out culture has. Sort of speaks volumes about our current Youtube fix, where we'd jump at the chance to watch something like a teenage girl getting her ass kicked by a group of other teen girls. What's the big difference between that and watching the savagery at play in Cannibal Holocaust?
This could just very well be a despicable piece of cinema. One that crosses the line of "freely-expressed yet punishing art with a statement to make" into the territory of "mean-spirited, heartless, cold, and just plain wrong imagery that only taints the viewer's soul." My stance is found somewhere in the middle of these two lines.
And the documentarians, fortunately, are four of the biggest scumbags ever, truly obnoxious and cruel in how they treat the primitive tribesfolk they intrude upon. So when they're all sickly murdered and fed upon, you sort of find yourself rooting for the cannibal tribespeeps. Because you realize that us "civilized" folk can actually be much more savage and cruel than any primitive person. Such acting is in a primitive person's DNA, but we civilized folk should know better. But some of us--such as the characters here--don't, so they deserve to decapitated and raped and eaten. Truth hurts.
This is just something I personally took away from Cannibal Holocaust. I could be wya off, or even a bit wrong for trying to justify the intense shit I just watched. Shit that would probably scare off any girl/date who stepped foot in my bedroom and saw the DVD cover in my collection, if I were to ever own it. And honestly, I kinda do wanna own it, just to have such a unique and nasty bit of cinema under my belt. Yes, I'm fucking weird like that.
I don't even know if I'll ever want to watch this flick again. But I'm sure glad I did, at least this once. Now I totally understand why it's looked at by horror lovers and experts as a true classic, an untouchable viewing experience, one of the most important films to ever hit the genre.
And now I dare anybody who reads this to watch it....but if you vomit or become furiously angry, don't blame me, the messenger.
Yes, this is what I tend to do on my spare time. Watch shit like Cannibal Holocaust, voluntarily. Deal with it.
**Interesting extra bit of trivia: the director, Ruggero Deodato, was actually brought on trial in his native Italy when this film was released. The government, from what I've read and heard, thought the images seen in Cannibal Holocaust were real, not staged. The animal slayings are real again, but the powers that be thought the stuff done to humans was all authentic. And who can blame them? I'd swear it was all real now, too.....and that being said, kudos to the special effects crew responsible for this, using resources available way back in the late '70s. Pretty fucking astonishing work. I'm surprised they're not hailed as some sort of genius pioneers.
**The music, as heard in this trailer-of-sorts, is also worth noting....its this really serene, soggy-keyboard effect that really complements the brutality in a strikign way....and you'll also notice how bad the acting is, when its just scenes of dialogue. Well, its an old exploitation flick--acting is secondary, sometimes even third or fourth in importance. Simply par for the course:
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