aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, aka Last Cannibal World, aka Cannibal, aka Carnivorous, aka The Last Survivor

• Directed by Ruggero Deodato
• Written by Tito Carpi, Gianfranco Clerici and Renzo Genta
• Starring
  • Massimo Foschi
  • Me Me Lai
  • Ivan Rassimov
  • Sheik Razak Shikur
  • Judy Rosly

Italian directors get a hard razzing from B-movie reviewers as a matter of course, since the entire Italian film industry (or at least the segment of the industry that concentrated on films for worldwide release instead of purely domestic product) seemed to concentrate for decades on identifying a (usually American) trend and then beating it into the ground. (You want examples? How about Westerns, post-Dawn of the Dead zombie flicks, and post-Star Wars space operas?) There are really only two genres of popular film that the Italians can claim as their own: the “pepla” or “sword-and-sandal” flicks (which, truth be told, were inspired by American-produced historical/Biblical epics), and cannibal movies. Not only did the Italians effectively create the genre, they utterly dominated it for its short run, before cannibal movies cross-pollinated into, and effectively became a part of, zombie movies.

Most would trace the origins of the Italian cannibal genre as a genre to Umberto Lenzi’s Man From Deep River (1972), but it really got its power thrusters turned on when Ruggero Deodato, who up until that time had dabbled in pepla between crime-drama projects, turned out this movie in 1977, originally meant as sort of a “pseudo-sequel” to Lenzi’s film. (He followed it up with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, and incorporated elements of his jungle/cannibal movies into the third-world thriller Cut and Run (1985), thus making his “cannibal trilogy”; this movie got the title under which I’m reviewing it retroactively, as Cannibal Holocaust made enough of a splash to justify a re-release.) Oddly enough, Jungle Holocaust wasn’t just a cheap little horror/exploitation crank-’em-out, though the budget certainly was paltry. In an attempt to imbue the movie with realism, he shot it all on location in Malaysia and Mindanao, using a mostly native cast; the title card which starts the movie claims it to be a true story. I don’t know about that claim, but I know that treating it as if it was a recreation rather than a tawdry B-movie adds something to it — a patina, almost, of respectability.

We first meet our protagonist, Robert Harper (Massimo Foschi), in a single-prop plane, accompanied by friends and work associate Rolf (Ivan Rassimov, was also in Man From Deep River), pilot Charlie (Sheik Razak Shikur), and Swan (Judy Rosly), whose purpose there is vague, save to be the first victim (whoops, spoilers). Robert is in oil exploration, and their trip out from the Philippines is to a rudimentary camp set up in the southeast Asian wilds by his advance survey team. When they reach the landing strip, though, it’s umkempt and overgrown; they lose a wheel in landing (though reattaching it doesn’t prove a large problem) because it collided with what turns out to be the camp radio, ruined and discarded.

“Charlie! How many fingers am I holding up?”

That should be a sign that something is seriously amiss here, but Robert and Rolf casually head for the camp to give the guys a stern talking-to on proper airfield and radio care. It’s only when they reach the camp to find it deserted that they start to think that maybe there’s more going on here — especially when they find a Stone Age-style spear nearby. A quick look through the nearby woods finds (what’s supposed to be) the rotting head of one of the surveyors. Suddenly, Robert and Rolf see the wisdom of leaving, but even with the airplane wheel reattached, they can’t take off this late in the day. They determine to spend the night safely in the plane, but when Swan slips out to use the little girl’s room, they hear a single scream and then nothing more.

In the morning, the three men chop a trail through the jungle to look for her; a fragment of her clothing turns out to be bait for a huge boobytrap that kills Charlie, and suddenly the two men find themselves lost in the woods, as they had been relying on Charlie’s sense of direction. And if they hadn’t realized their predicament, they do when they observe from the bushes a dozen primitive jungle dwellers around a campfire, eating meat that yesterday was called “Swan.” They’re lost in a jungle with cannibals.

They hope that the river they run across will lead them back to the airstrip, and construct a quick bamboo raft to make the journey easier, but they hadn’t counted on the constant of every jungle river in every movie back to the silent serial days: a waterfall. Robert loses Rolf, the raft, and his machete.

And it gets worse. Hungry, he takes a risk on some mushrooms, a gamble which ends up with him vomiting and passing out. When he regains consciousness, he’s surrounded by the cannibals. They take him back to the huge cave in which they live communally, and it’s here that Nathan realizes that his normal breast totals (and penis totals, for that matter) would be useless; a majority of the older tribe members wear a perfunctory loincloth, but anyone adolescent and younger goes unadorned, and none of the women wear tops. (Not that there are many women in evidence; aside from a half-dozen females, it’s a primitive jungle sausage party.)

“It’s only a dream… one of those junior-high dreams… any time now, there’ll be cheerleaders…”

They tie the panicked Robert to a rock, poke him, prod him, and then tear off his clothing, right down too and including the black cotton underoos. It’s funny; in the videotaped introduction from Ruggero Deodato to the Shriek Show disc of Jungle Holocaust, Deodato commends Foschi as a brave and physically imposing actor, and laments that this movie would be nigh impossible to make today because too many modern actors are “afraid of the outdoors.” Obviously, that’s a little-known Italian euphemism for “letting your wedding tackle swing free in Malaysia.” Special note in this scene of the one pretty cannibal woman (Me Me Lai, another veteran of Man From Deep River) who takes special notice of Robert’s anteater. By “pretty one,” I mean that her hair isn’t matted, her skin isn’t covered with scars and mud, her breachfront property has held out well against gravity (in fact, I’m pretty sure she’s got implants), and in close-ups you can see that her eyebrows are groomed. (She’s never given a name during the movie; the credits list her as “Pulan,” which I’m pretty sure is a sly wink at her main reaction to seeing Robert for the first time.) In a normal movie, or even a normal exploitation movie, she would be designated the “love interest,” but Jungle Holocaust isn’t nearly conventional enough to allow us to use that label.

Robert ends up locked in a subcave, sometimes with a hornbill as company, sometime with a restrained eagle. He spends days getting pissed on by adolescent cannibals (damned little rotters are the same the world over) and fighting for foodscraps with the birds. Eventually, though, he realizes that he’s in the cooler, and I don’t mean solitary confinement: He’ll either be eaten, or be used as bait for something else the tribe wants to eat more. He thus cleverly uses the Chekov Gambit, acting unresponsive until someone comes into to check on him and he bashes their head in with a rock.

In the course of escape, he grabs Pulan from where she’s about to be subjected to forcible sexual relations (more on that later) — not, we assume, because she’s been the only adult semi-nice to him and not because she has gravity-defying tatas, but because he needs a guide to the terrain and a foraging expert, since his own little experiment with the mushrooms is what got him here in the first place.

Hey, is it later already? It is. He ties Pulan’s hands together with a vine and leads her unwillingly through the jungle, but when he stops to wash some of the cave crud off of him (in water that turns out to be leach-infested), she escapes. He tracks her down, beats her in frustration, and then, yes, rapes her.

“I am the very model of a modern Stone-Age cannibal!”

Now, I want to comment on the divergent terms I used for what was about to happen to Pulan in the cave, and what Robert does to her. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the cannibal tribe doesn’t share modern Western sexual mores; it seems to be a culture marked by a lack of sympathy (as evidenced by other actions taken against fellow tribe members which I haven’t described here), and not only that, but females are particularly undervalued, if we tie the low number of women to a scene we see later: A cannibal woman gives birth alone on the river’s edge and cuts the umbilical cord with her teeth, then, seeing that the newborn is female, tosses it in the river for the crocodiles. I don’t think it would be out of this cultural norm for the few women kept to be used and abused at will by the menfolk. I think for it to qualify as “rape,” there has to be an element of unwillingness which simply would not be present in a society like this. Please understand, I am in no way excusing rape or any other form of sexual assault; what I am saying is that the cannibal culture is so degraded that forcible sex doesn’t fall far enough below the behavioral baseline to be a horrific crime in that cultural context.

Robert, on the other hand, is a Western (supposedly American) man, raised in a culture which values personal freedoms and autonomy. For him to subject another to forced sex — and particularly in anger, using sex as a weapon and a punishment — is heinous. In other words, what Robert committed was rape, even if what Pulan received wasn’t.

(As further evidence that she, though an unwilling “partner,” interpreted the act as something other than what we would think of as rape, from that moment she stays with Robert willingly; when he wakes up from his post-brutality nap, he finds that she has foraged for edibles for them both, and he has his first good meal since his capture. To her, the act wasn’t rape; it was a culturally acceptable declaration of ownership. As I said before, it isn’t the singular act that’s specifically repugnant, it’s the broader cannibal culture which allows such acts within its normative practices.)

As long as I’ve addressed the most reprehensible part of the movie, I might as well tackle what people tend to think is the second-most reprehensible part: the animal violence. Humans aren’t all that gets eaten in Jungle Holocaust, and whether it’s a snake eating a bat or the cannibal tribe killing and eviscerating a crocodile, all the non-human bloodshed in the movie is real. To a lot of people, this qualifies as “animal mutilation” and is evidence of a priori cruelty. Within certain strictures, though, I didn’t have a problem with it, and here’s why:

All the same, I’m not buying his dating guide.

Unlike,say, “dinosaur” movies in which a couple of lizards are forced to fight in front of the camera, the encounters that are featured in Jungle Holocaust are plausibly natural for the environment. I have no problem believing that snakes do devour bats in the wild, for example, and thus a simple addition of a camera does not turn a “circle of life” moment into indefensible mutilation. You can force animals to fight, but you can’t force a big-ass snake to devour a monitor lizard if it really doesn’t want to; in that regard, the feeding of one animal to another (or engineering the circumstances in which one can eat another) is really no more morally bankrupt than what happens to white mice in the homes of snake owners across this enlightened land of ours. The crocodile, it’s true, is killed by performers in the roles of the tribesmen, but it isn’t tortured to death; the cannibals immediately thrust a sharp stone blade into its skull before skinning it. I can’t document that this is the way in which these Malaysian natives would hunt and butcher a crocodile when movie cameras aren’t present, but again it seems plausible, and thus not a particularly cruel way to kill an animal. I’m not a hunter, but I neither declare all sport hunters to be amoral savages, nor do I draw some sort of arbitrary line between “crocodile vs. stone knife” on one hand and “deer vs. 30.06″ on the other. (If the crocodile carcass was left to rot instead of being eaten by someone, of course, that’s a egregious waste, but…)

All the same, to think that an audience wants to see a crocodile filleted by a Stone Age tribe for entertainment is a whole ‘nother kind of icky…

And against a backdrop of realism, the fake body parts used for “cannibalism” are unconvincing. I suppose I should be horrified when a dead woman is gutted, her ribcage forced wide, and hot stones placed inside the body cavity, and the flesh cooked from the inside… but the skin and the ribs look unconvincing, and real guts don’t come out cleanly like they do here (a lesson learned from watching the real gutting of the crocodile earlier). I no more reacted violently to it than I do to a “rotting cadaver” prop in a Halloween display. (Part of the problem in that scene is probably the music. Most of the film is unaccompanied by any kind of score, with some ominous thudding themes used here and there — but the aforementioned evisceration was accompanied by a bright, cheery tune that seemed more appropriate for a picnic on a red-checked blanket rather than a cannibal massacre and feast. And no, I don’t think it was ironic, just inept.)

All of which means that true drama, true suspense, and true pathos rely in Jungle Holocaust on the same thing they rely on in other movies: human emotion. Foschi is a fine actor as Robert, especially in the many silent scenes which don’t rely on the American dubbing; his portrayal frustration and despair lend an immediacy that all the foam latex and Karo syrup in the world can’t match. The most moving scene has Robert almost back to the airstrip but confronted again by the cannibal tribe, one of whom wordlessly challenges him to single combat. The hardened Robert defeats him and then, to impress upon the watching tribesman that he is their equal instead of a piece of meat, he slits open his opponent’s abdomen, pulls out an organ (the heart, presumably) and proceeds to bite huge hunks out of it while shouting wordlessly. Tears are streaming down his face, as he acts on — but still hates — the lengths to which he must go to survive in this world. (Of course, one could argue that this moment of pathos and self-recrimination could rightly have come after the earlier rape scene…)

VALENTIENZ DAY: UR DOIN IT WRONG.

So. Almost more of an anthropological exploration than an exploitation flick, Jungle Holocaust is… I don’t know if I want to call it “intelligent,” but it’s definitely thoughtful. By showing what is supposedly the last human taboo and the circumstances surrounding it in a non-prurient manner, Deodato stays true in spirit, in an odd sort of way, to the documentary claims made in the opening title card.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: between 6 and 8, plus 1 monitor lizard, 1 bat, 1 snake, 1 eagle, 1 crocodile, and 1 catfish
• breasts: enough to make a count meaningless (same goes for penises)
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0