Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

• Directed by Ruggero Deodato
• Written by Gianfranco Clerici
• Starring
  • Robert Kerman
  • Francesca Ciardi
  • Perry Pirkanen
  • Luca Giorgio Barbareschi
  • Salvatore Basile

After the success of Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, aka Jungle Holocaust (1977), it was pretty much guaranteed that Ruggero Deodato would return to the well again. After all, he’s an Italian director, and if there’s one thing Italian filmmakers are even better at than American filmmakers, it’s wringing the last bit of marketability out of a trend. I guess Ultimo Mondo Cannibale was mistitled, as it really wasn’t the “last cannibal world” after all.

The resulting film, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), is one of the self-proclaimed contenders for the most-banned movie in the world, and if you know it at all, you know it because of the litany of atrocities which can be witnessed in it, some staged and some real. I’m sure that Deodato was pressed to “turn up the juice” in this movie; after all, when extreme violence are the selling point, it doesn’t pay to simply deliver the same thing we’ve already seen. Deodato should have quit while he was ahead, though; Cannibal Holocaust does ramp up the violence and cruelty, but in all other respects it’s far inferior to Jungle Holocaust.

“Man, I always get the fingers. Howcome Bob always gets the thigh?”

The story starts in medias res; as we’re told by a helpful TV reporter, source of many a chunk of needed exposition for lazy filmmakers, a famous documentary team which entered the Amazon jungle to seek out the fabled cannibal tribes has been incommunicado for two months. New York University and the network backers of the documentarians put together a “rescue party” consisting of one man, and no, he isn’t Chuck Norris: Professor Monroe (Robert Kerman — or pornstar R. Bolla of Debbie Does Dallas, if you prefer), a young anthropologist. Although he’s never been in the Amazon, he’s got experience from other expeditions, and shucks, one jungle is the same as another, right?

Monroe flies down to JungleLand, where he meets up with his guide Chaco (Salvatore Basile) and his right-hand man Miguel (uncredited). Despite his much-lauded expeditionary experience, Monroe seems to have a little more woodsense than your average Cub Scout. The local police have captured a member of the Yacomo tribe — not one of the tribes they’re looking for, and only occasionally cannibalistic. They use the Yacomo to lead them to their village, where Miguel gains their trust by… well, by stripping naked and not flinching when the Yacomo blow their curare-tipped darts at him.

In fact, the three of them are welcomed to Old Home Week, practically, despite what the elder of the village makes known with gestures and grunting: that a bunch of strangers came into the village and wreaked havoc, burning huts with people inside and generally being Ugly Americans. (Should I hyphenate that? Is it an ethnicity? I don’t see it on my census form…) From the Yacomo village, they venture further to the territory split between the Yanomamo and the Shamatari, warring tribes which regularly catch and eat each other. Somewhat at random, they shoot at the Shamatari in one of the tribal conflicts and become the cautious friends of the Yanomamo. Through a combination technological magic (a tape recorder) and old-fashioned nudity again (this time, Monroe wades into the stream and waits for the local wimmenfolk to get curious), they gain the tribe’s trust, and eventually are shown to two moldering skeletons with film cameras.

“Yeah, well, the balcony seats are always cheaper.”

After participating in a communal meal with them (the main course being someone non-communal), Monroe gets the film canisters and they leave for the comfort of New York City.

Now. That’s the first half of the movie. It’s got its share of tasteless, degrading violence; on their journey to the Yacomo village, the explorers spy a local male giving his wife the local treatment for adultery: he violates her with a stone until she bleeds, stuffs her netherparts full of mud, and then bashes her head in. That kind of inclusion, I guess, is necessary so that the second half of the movie won’t take you by surprise.

Because once they get the film back to the city, the network wants to know what all the fuss was about. From here to the closing credits, it’s mostly the found footage, edited together to skip over the damaged film and, as the editor mentions, overlaid with a bit of stock music. You know, for mood.

The four documentarians, Alan (Gabriel Yorke), Faye (Francesca Ciardi), Jack (Perry Pirkanen) and Mark (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) have a reputation among the network higher-ups for “staging” some of their footage. What we find out even more forcefully is that they’re assholes. My apologies if that kind of language is beyond what you expect from your mild-mannered reviewer (and if so, what are you doing reading a review of Cannibal Holocaust?), but there are no qualifiers in English to describe how fully these four are assholes. (Stinking boil-covered assholes with anal leakage, maybe?) I think that there may have been some intent to show the four “civilized” people slowly going from the rudimentary constraints of Western civilization to a full-on Heart of Darkness descent, but if so, it was bungled in its execution; these four start out as human garbage.

Monroe, wishing he had packed in some dental floss.

How much worse? Well, when they get close to the Yacomo village, they shoot one in the leg so that his escape to the village will be slow enough for them to follow. Once they get to the village, they shoot the villagers’ pig. And then, just for fun, they round up as many Yacomo are they can into one grass hut and start it on fire. Most escape; some don’t. Hyuk, hyuk, awful lot of fun you can have in the Amazon, huh?

Having cowed the Yacomo, their next destination is further into the jungle to the Yanomamo and the Shamatari. In the final reel of footage, they catch a nubile Yanomamo girl and immediately gang-rape her on film, taking turns behind the camera. (Faye, the sole female of the expedition, is outraged — but mostly because they’ve only got two reels of film left, so why waste it?) Later in their trek, when they discover that their victim had been executed by her own tribe, they greet the sight of her body skewered from genitals to mouth with kid-in-the-candy-store grins, until they remember they’re filming and adopt expressions appropriate for civilized man confronting evidence of savagery.

In other words, these assholes deserve everything that happens to them when the tribe comes out en masse.

Now. I spoke somewhat in my review of Jungle Holocaust about animal cruelty, which is both an odd sine qua non in cannibal flicks and the magnet for a disproportionate share of the disgust that such films elicit. There are plenty of on-camera animal casualties in this movie, including a large river turtle, a tarantula, a pig, and a monkey. (Two monkeys, actually, as the scene in question was shot twice from different angles.) There’s even an option on the Grindhouse Releasing DVD to watch an “animal cruelty-free” version. But here’s the thing: I didn’t see any “animal cruelty,” at least in the manner in which most people use the phrase. The two incidents most people cite are the turtle and the monkey(s), and they’re certainly violent; in each case, the animal has its head chopped off. Does that qualify as cruelty or mutilation? I mean, if you’re going to butcher an animal, you should kill it first, right? And decapitation is as clean and quick a method of dispatching your dinner as I can think of. (Much messier than the pneumatic hammer that dispatches most cattle in our assembly-line slaughterhouses, but just as effective at instantly disrupting the nervous system.) The turtle was to be butchered for dinner, and if the actors are indeed eating the turtle meat in the next scene as they appear to be, then there’s no foul. (Unless the turtle was endangered, of course.) I know that the meat I buy in the supermarket doesn’t just appear in the supermarket.

The same thing goes for the monkey. I admit that we in the Western world feel an instinctive revulsion at violence against an animal so much like us, especially if it’s intended for the menu, but that’s as much a cultural habit as anything else. Deodato had intended to use a prop monkey for the scene, but the natives who played the roles of cannibals asked to use the real thing, as monkey meat is a delicacy for them. I don’t know, then, that we can condemn them for “animal cruelty” any more than, say, the African tribe that was featured in the December 2009 National Geographic, which took the feature writer on a baboon hunt with them and afterward shared its brains at dinnertime.

The documentarians, in their last interview before they head into the Amazon for dinner.

So the actual “animal cruelty” I just don’t see. (Except against the tarantula, because nobody ate if afterward. But nobody gets up in arms over the tarantula.) There is, of course, the separate issue that these butcherings were filmed in detail for the entertainment value to be had in their garish violence, and that I do have a problem with. “Bad taste” is even less adequate to express my reactions to Deodato’s artistic sensibilities than “asshole” was. And the animal killings are not what generates my strongest response.

Because to focus, misguidedly in my opinion, on the actual killing of animals in the course of filming is to judge the production, not the movie. Whether or not any given animal — or person¹ — was harmed for the camera’s benefit ignores the fact that the actions portrayed and the story thus told revels in cruelty. It really wouldn’t matter if the movie was made with live actors, traditional animation, or CGI modeling (save that the images would be much less realistic in the latter cases); we’re still being fed images which linger lovingly on rape, mutilation, cruelty, and pain. And those are not story elements in service of a greater narrative; those are the point of the movie.

Documentary crew leader Alan verges on chortling sociopathy; I would say that he’s cartoonish in his evil, except one expects cartoonish evil to be abstracted into such “safe” and pain-free make-believe arenas as conquering the world or killing the last Jedi. Let’s just call him “exaggerated,” then, and the whole point of said exaggeration is to give occasion for the scenes of cruelty already listed. There is, of course, A Moral to the story, which is so blatant and neon-outlined that even the dullest of viewers can’t miss it; it’s said out loud, after all — twice. Who are the real savages, and who are the truly civilized? It’s the kind of theme that A) probably sounds really deep while high on some primo domestic weed, and B) is stated so baldly as a cover for the filmmakers to hide behind when someone accuses them of violence for violence’s sake: “Nuh-uh, we had a message!” Compared to this, the civilization/savagery theme in Jungle Holocaust was subtle to homeopathic levels.

The movie would be even more offensive if its flaws didn’t dull its edge. It’s not just a crude movie; it’s a clumsy one. We spend the first half of the movie with Professor Monroe, looking for the documentary crew; we spend the entire second half essentially in flashback, and all of that time is with people we hate and whom we know are dead by the events of the first half. Horror fans have been loudly proclaiming for the last decade that The Blair Witch Project did nothing that Cannibal Holocaust didn’t do, but at least The Blair Witch Project didn’t play with the net down; the footage doesn’t stop periodically so that someone watching it can comment on the repulsiveness of it all, and there wasn’t music layered in to make it more “cinematic” and less real.

Behavior not recommended in How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Deodato has gone on record since that day to say that he wishes he had never made the movie, and to most loudly regret (naturally) the animal butchery. I agree with him, but not because the movie is offensive, though it is that; by imitating only the grossest and shallowest elements of Jungle Holocaust, Deodato demonstrates with Cannibal Holocaust that what good there was in the older film was there because of storytelling accident, not artistry.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 38 (plus 1 turtle, 1 muskrat, 1 tarantula, 1 snake, 1 monkey, and 1 pig)
• breasts: lost count
• male sausages: 4
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0

1. Deodato was hauled into court upon the movie’s opening because enough people assumed that actors had actually been killed for his art; some of those actors had to come and demonstrate their continued nondeadness for the charges to be dropped.[back]