Well, I was going to watch this one when the fundraising hit a certain level, but I decided to go ahead with this before then because I figured that I didn't want to have it lurking in the corner of the bedroom until next year. So I decided to face it, a real challenge for me to sit through the whole thing. As promised, I'm going to give my full thoughts on this one, mainly so I can properly purge the memory, and have something constructive from putting myself through it. It's the poster child for the whole Video Nasties moral panic (somewhat literally, its poster was the main image used in a lot of news stories at the time), it's 1979's Cannibal Holocaust.
I'm not going to embed the real trailer, as even that is shockingly explicit, you can see it here if you like. So I'll pepper this article with some trailers and clips for other cannibalism movies that I actually like.
Now those that know me or follow my blog know that I am not a prude by any stretch of the imagination. I have been to many weird, f***ed up places before in going through cinema, one of my favourite comedy movies is Peter Jackson's Braindead, and I'm currently eagerly anticipating my UHD version of Dawn of the Dead. So keep that in mind when I say that this movie is an incredibly grueling experience, one that I, no joke, honestly needed to have a nice cup of tea, an Eccles cake, and a cuddle with my soft toys to pull myself together after it had finished. Thank gods I had all to hand at home, not sure I would have coped if it was a cinema viewing.
I should also mention though that I haven't really delved much into the whole Italian cannibal sub-genre before this; the closest ones I have come to before now were Cannibal Apocalypse (which is more an infection movie, kinda like a zombie virus but no undeath, just a craving for long pig), and Zombi Holocaust, which tried to combine a knock of this with a knock off of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. I haven't really gone in because well, it didn't appeal, it's basically an extension of the old jungle adventure narrative, just with more gore and sex. This meant that of course a lot of these are built on a tonne of racist, colonialist beliefs, portraying the natives in the worst light imaginable, making them literally people-eating monsters. However, one of the reasons I was willing to give this one a chance was that I knew that it's not just another people munching tale, it's also kind of a deconstruction of the whole thing, trying to do something a bit more clever. Remarkably, I will agree that it is actually kind of a clever film, there's certainly a brain in its head, but as for whether it really succeeds in the whole deconstructionist goal... well that's a complicated thing to try and answer, although I'm leaning towards "no, but...".
Ultra-brief plot rundown; a group of documentary filmmakers have gone missing in the Amazon rainforest, whilst making a documentary film. We follow an anthropologist as he goes looking for them, encountering a trio of tribes, one of whom has the remains of those filmmakers, and all the cans of their footage, cameras, etc. That's the first half of the film, the second half consists of the material, once all taken back to New York, being examined and edited by the anthropologist and the TV executives who commissioned the documentary, where we learn what happened to the film crew... and how they bought about their fate.
If part of that setup is sounding a bit familiar, yes this is in an odd way a precursor to the modern found footage movement, with quite a lot of this feeling like a direct ancestor to The Blair Witch Project. I'm not sure how aware the makers of Blair Witch were of this one, though given they named their production company Haxan films, they seem horror-savvy enough to know be familiar by reputation at least. Even down to the basic set up it's similar; "filmmakers go missing making a documentary, sometime later their footage is found". Of course, there are big differences, notably that we have a whole framing story around the footage, which goes into the details of how it's found, what those who recover it make of what we see, etc. The really big difference though is that though BW almost goes out of its way to have things happen just off-camera, whereas CH has a long leering look at all its horrors, although shot in a frantic, handheld manner. What's more, there's a reason why it's filmed this way, which not only deals with the old "drop the camera and run" problem in found footage, but it also ties into the main theme of the film
The first half of the film plays a lot like your standard cannibal film of the time, but with a few nods that there's something else going on. The guides mention that the tribes we meet (firstly the normally friendly Yakumo, then the warring Yanamamo and Shamatarai) are being more hostile, and more aggressive to everyone than usual, and they seem to really regard their previous bunch of visitors as bad news all around. Then in the second half of the film, we get a reason why; our documentarians were in fact far from passive, neutral observers, often trying to orchestrate things to make them as sensational as possible (there's a bit before their footage starts where it's implied that for their previous doc, they may have gone so far as stage-manage a full-on war crime!). Thus they actually enacted a reign of terror on the tribes, hoping to sell most of the footage as the three waging war on each other. There's a bit where the film's most striking visual moment occurs, a woman impaled from mouth to... end, and it's very heavily implied that the doc crew did it. So when they are gotten by the cannibals, it's almost a relief, a just-desserts considering what we have seen reels of them doing.
So what we have here is a full-on "who's the real monsters here?" tale (in fact, the very last line is literally "I wonder who the real cannibals are?", just to make sure you got it). This is actually in response to something else going on with European exploitation cinema, the "Mondo" documentary, the sort of thing that Faces of Death was a part of, and had been kickstarted by the notorious Mondo Cane. Here what we have is a story where the trend of this sort of thing, showing other cultures to be weird, gross, bloodthirsty, etc. but really it's full-on cultural character assassination by western filmmakers, turned up to 11. There's a moment when the leader of the documentary crew has a speech to the camera about the whole "law of the jungle, survival of the fittest" business all jungle adventure movies and such do, and it's clear given the context of the scene that we are meant to see this as utter self-aggrandizing bullshit. All the true horror in here is the direct, malicious fault of Western influences, and for having a stance like that, I could almost hug the film. Almost (I'll get to why not in a minute).
It's worth mentioning that, of course, all the jungle footage is most remembered (for good or ill), but the media satire scenes in New York are really well done. There were quite a few Italian exploitation productions doing location filming there at the time (I mentioned a couple above, but there was also Contamination, Fulci's The New York Ripper, the Bronx trilogy...), and this is one of the better uses of the city. There's a good little montage about halfway through after the film was recovered where there are on the street interviews with the people who knew the doc crew, which feel really natural, as they all talk about missing them, but noticeably all have difficulty in saying anything genuinely, well, nice about them. Also, the scenes at the TV studio are well done, with the executives still trying to convince themselves that they can get something sensational to broadcast from the film footage... until they actually see it to the end. (If this had been made just a couple of years later in the Reagan years, I can imagine this ending differently and the suits still going for showing it). This is a smart concept, that really does try to criticize the whole subgenre. As if you can't guess though, these last couple of paragraphs are the extra fluffy cushions for an incoming very big "but".
But the problem is, this is still a jungle cannibal movie. The problem the film has is that it tries to criticize the cruelty and such in these movies... whilst indulging in them to the most absurd degree of any of them. There's a bit that's self-reflexive where we see the start of the doc crew's previous film, and its credits are in exactly the same font and such as the actual movie. The thing is, I think director Ruggero Deodato should have been more introspective; he showing us all these terrible sights, and going "aren't films that do this terrible?". It is possible to do this sort of thing of course; Robocop is an insanely violent film that manages to criticize the violence inherent to American media, by acknowledging the absurdity of it, the grim comedy. This one plays all its incredibly graphic gore utterly straight, so it's just adding to the issue (although I am so glad that some of the things that happened in here didn't get played for laughs!).
The gory violence is disturbing enough but even worse is a lot of the sexual violence. How bad? Let me put it like this; I lost track of how many rape/sexual assault/genital attack scenes there were. If it ever gets to that point, it's definitely too goddamn many! Women, whether it's the members of the tribes or the solo female member of the doc crew, are treated awfully here. What's worse, there's at least one case of one, the first we actually see, getting victimized by the tribe directly, not the doc crew or anything. That really hurts the point the film was trying to make by straight-up having the tribes be a villainous force; I get not having them be pure and perfect to add some moral grey, but it still clashes horribly with the main thrust of the story, it starts you on the wrong foot. The fact that none of the tribespeople are actual characters, mostly kept as an anonymous mass, really doesn't help matters. I should mention that there is some male nudity too, and the film's most explicit crime against genitalia is against one of the men; not saying anything about if that "balances things out" or not, it's just there.
But easily, even beyond all of that, the film's biggest crime is some real-life violence; there is actual killing of animals in this, the stand out being a scene where a turtle is captured, killed, pulled apart, and eaten. There are even more too; in fact, in fact, a big chunk of my notes for this just have me scribbling down "poor spider! Monkey, no! Piggy, NO!!!". This does kind of break the film's main point and thesis altogether; it wants to critique the media for causing harm for the purpose of entertainment, but then actually does it for real, and specifically for this purpose. (Wake in Fright, an Australian film I quite like, has footage of a real Kangaroo hunt, but it cuts around the worst of it, and it's one that was going to happen anyway, so the filmmakers just grabbed some footage, it wasn't staged specifically for them). Yeah, as if the rest of this thing wasn't enough to freak out the BBFC, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back (I can assure you though, no camels were harmed in the making of this film... though probably only because there were none around at the time). Deodato has actually acknowledged since what a mistake this was, and there is a new edit with as much of that as possible removed. Well, that's a good step, but still doesn't excuse them doing it in the first place.
So you see the problem; it can't have its long pig and eat it. In trying to deconstruct and satirize the genre it indulges in a lot of the worst habits to an astounding degree. If the goal was to make you not want to see these things again, mixed success there; I certainly don't want to, but it actually gave the genre a fresh wind, to the point there were loads more of the bloody films, including unofficial sequels. There was a few years ago a tribute called The Green Inferno (which is what the film-within-the-film was planned to be called), made by Eli Roth; not seen it, but from a read of the synopsis, and knowing a bit about Roth's personal politics, I feel safe in guessing that he completely missed the point of this one. Also, it's been recently announced that Deodato himself is working on a video game sequel to this film, which is one of the reasons I finally decided to face the thing this year. I'm really not sure what the point of it is, as there are no cannibal movies to critique anymore, this does feel like a complete cash grab.
Here's Moviebob's take on the news on the games' launch, and a bit more about the film.
Whilst on this tangent, let's talk about some of the controversy surrounding this one, and the way that having a look at things, it does seem to be that a lot of the trouble the film has is kind of its own fault, for reasons beyond the content. I mentioned the whole video nasties thing above; well the incident that really got the ball rolling on that whole fiasco was when Mary Whitehouse herself was sent a copy because the distributors thought that her indignation would be hilarious. If you find her basically almost destroying the entire video industry funny, I guess mission accomplished. The film has actually been accused of being a snuff movie quite a few times too. Well, if you're a turtle, it kind of is, but joking aside, the film actually ends with a note suggesting that someone faced criminal charges for stealing the doc crew's footage, implying it was all real. However, I think that the whole media critique angle, accusing the MSM of being complicit to at least a degree with what it reports, is one factor that I think has really made it an extra big target for controversy over the years. Tabloids, TV News, etc. love to use extreme media as a punching bag, but anything that criticizes them really gets them angry, so naturally, this is a perfect storm for their hatred.
In the end, then, what did I make of my journey into this one? Well, I can safely say that, though it certainly has relevant points to make about media portrayals of other cultures, it makes a lot of mistakes that end up hurting the overall message, the key one being the sickening level of extreme violence. It's truly emotionally draining to watch, so honestly, as valid as its critique is, I really cannot recommend you sit down and watch the thing. I have come through this experience perhaps a bit stronger and wiser in the long run though; the fact that I can come out of this experience with something relevant to say I find encouraging. So to wrap up, please make this worth my time and my nerves and give what you can to my Crisis crowdfunder. And before you ask, I might do Last House on the Left now, depending on what response I get to this one.
Huh, you know something? I'm surprised I found that many cannibal movies that aren't jungle films!
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