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CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
Rating: 
Italy. 1979.
Director – Ruggero Deodato, Screenplay – Gianfranco Clerici, Producers – Franco Di Nunzio & Franco Palaggi, Photography – Sergio D’Offizi, Music – Riz Ortolani, Special Effects – Aldo Gasparri, Production Design – Massimo Antonella Greig. Production Company – F.D. Cinematografica.
Cast:
Robert Kerman (Professor Harold Monroe), Gabriel Yorke (Alan Yates), Francesca Ciardi (Faye Daniels), Perry Perkinan (Jack Danvers), Luca Barbareschi (Mark Williams), Salvatore Basile (Jacko)
Plot: New York anthropologist Harold Monroe heads an expedition into the area of the Brazilian jungle known as The Green Inferno in search of missing documentary filmmaker Alan Yates and his three person crew who went to make a documentary about cannibal tribes. Among two cannibal tribes, the Yakumo and the Yamami, Monroe discovers the crew’s dead bodies and several canisters of film. Back in New York, Monroe is asked to host a tv special about the Yates expedition. Viewing the film footage, he and the producers are shocked to see that it shows Yates and crew torturing, raping and killing the tribespeople, all to get authentic ‘cannibal’ footage. But then the film shows how the natives rose up and took revenge against the filmmakers.
If there ever was a film that deserved the label ‘notorious’ then it is surely Cannibal Holocaust. It is the most famous among the late 1970s/early 1980s genre of Italian cannibal films that determined to push the boundaries of extremism as far as it was possible to go. It has been banned in just about every country in the world – including its own native Italy. (Although this is all something that it seems to wear as a badge of pride during its 2001 US theatrical release). It is a film whose reputation has survived through bootleg copies and the fierce proselytism of people like Chas Balun as one of the most extreme and uncompromising of all cannibal and gore films.
And the gore gets fairly extreme – legs severed with a machete, a woman tied up by native women and her child forcibly aborted, multiple rapes including one where native woman is held down and raped and then her head bashed in with a stone dildo, a guy’s dick being cut off and so on. What is more alarming is the unnerving realism of the film. It gives the appearance of actually having gone out and shot on real locations in the Amazon (in actuality the wilds of Colombia). There is remarkably detailed and realistic observation of native rituals. Indeed Cannibal Holocaust was doing the whole faux documentary thing way before The Blair Witch Project (1999) was even an idea in someone’s video lens. The documentary realism is such that after the screening someone asked me if the incident really did happen. And when the film was first screened in Italy, director Ruggero Deodato was placed on trial and had to go to court to prove that what happens on screen was faked.
Perhaps what is most alarming about the film and is most definitely not faked at all is the violence enacted against animals. We see a musk rat being gutted with a knife while it is still alive, a snake hacked up with a hatchet, a scene where one of the filmmakers casually shoots a small pig that is tied up in the head and, most nauseatingly, a scene where a giant turtle is killed and then its organs eviscerated in sickening detail, solely for the camera’s edification. And what is quite disturbing about these scenes are the expressions of glee on the faces of the actors who are clearly getting off on what they are doing.
What is a little hard to swallow up against this is the message that the film tries to make wherein the documentary filmmakers trekking into the jungle are seen as so sadistically exploitative in their treatment of the natives that what they do becomes far more sickening and repulsive than the actual cannibals themselves. The film wants us to be shocked and outraged at the things the fictional filmmakers are prepared to do in the name of sensationalism. The question is:– when the film starts conducting quite shocking and alarmingly unfaked scenes of sadism against animals to make its point that filmmakers are exploitative, at what point does the outrage against the sleazy documentarians portrayed in the film end and the outrage against the filmmakers staging such an outrage begin? There’s a line here that seems not only to have been morally blurred as stepped way, way over. You’re never really sure whether the filmmakers either have a blind spot about the size of the Amazonian jungle itself in that they seem unaware that the very outrage they are trying to get us worked up about is one that can equally be leveled against them, or the film is being really clever and inviting an audience to ponder the relationship between the faked and the real in film and documentary and question the grander conception of the moral point a film usually guides us to. Cannibal Holocaust is a film that it is impossible to either praise or ignore without taking a moral point-of-view on it. And whether it was intended that way or not is exactly the whole of the moral dilemma.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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