It's quite an accomplishment for a film to consistently make the number one spot on every single "10 Most Disturbing Films Ever Made" list and an even harder reputation to live up to. Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, long a cult item in horror and splatter fandom, recently garnered international attention due to the release and multi-million dollar advertising blitz surrounding The Blair Witch Project, a film that, despite being hailed as daringly "original" by several horror-ignorant critics, owes more than a little of its plot to.
A group of documentary filmmakers, three men and one woman, make a journey into a notoriously deadly Amazon jungle known as the "Green Inferno" in search of a lost cannibal tribe, never to emerge. A year later, their footage is found.
Sound familiar?
The first hour of the film concerns the efforts of a scholar (Kerman, a 70's porn star better known under his nom des porn "R. Bolla" ) to figure out what happened to the filmmakers in the "Green Inferno". All he finds are their bones, fashioned into a macabre totem-esque sculpture, the centerpiece of which is their 16 millimeter camera. Inside is a well-preserved reel of film. Making his way back to New York, the footage is screened for him and a group of television execs. What they see are acts of cruelty and depravity that would make Vlad Tepes lose his lunch, most of which are committed by the filmmakers themselves against a group of natives ill-prepared to deal with the band of marauding outsiders willing do to anything and everything to get the footage they desire.
What has long made Cannibal Holocaust the most notorious horror movie ever made is the killing of real animals (i.e. a muskrat, a turtle, a squirrel monkey) in it, a practice employed by more than one Italian cannibal movie at the time to make the staged butchering of the actors seem more realistic. In fact, it's the reason that I refused to watch the film for over a decade. Finally, when a friend lent me his unofficial DVD copy, I caved in. Surely, I told myself, no film can live up to that kind of a rep.
How wrong I was.
While the first hour of the movie is pretty standard 70's Spaghetti Cannibal Movie nonsense, the last half hour of the film is stunning in its realism. I'm a critter-loving pussy and covered my eyes every time an animal came up for on-screen slaughter, but Cannibal Holocaust left me twitching for days nevertheless. It's not the real animal butchery, so much as the acts of cleverly staged cruelty to humans that got my stomach churning and my brain reeling.
Most notable is a scene where the scumfuck filmmakers rape a native girl, a surprisingly non-exploitative, artfully crafted scene where the assailants roll around in the mud with their victim. They return later to find her impaled on a huge wooden stake for the crime of being "polluted" by outsiders. The men joke and guffaw at the grisly spectacle, then feign sympathy when they know the cameras are on.
At that moment I reached an emotional low point. I just bottomed out completely. Then I had to admit to myself, however reluctant, through my physical and spiritual nauseau, "God damn... this is a good fucking movie."
You can't wait to see these cocksuckers get their come-uppance. But when it comes, the results aren't satisfying so much as they are depressing and inevitable.
Amazingly enough, it Deodato's orgy of savagery and anthropophagia lives up to its considerable reputation as "The Sickest Movie Ever Made". And what makes it so disturbing is that, despite its sleazier elements, there's some simply remarkable craftsmanship on display here. Call it art or trash, a masterpiece or an animal "snuff" film, Cannibal Holocaust is endowed with undeniable power. It doesn't blur the line between art and exploitation; it does away with it altogether.
