Here we are. The daddy. The numero uno. The big cheese. The head honcho of the video nasties. The film that put them all on the map when it's distribution company (Go Video) tried a publicity stunt using a letter sent to a conservative activist called Mary Whitehouse to drum up business and it backfired on them massively. She whipped up a media frenzy storm, the government got involved and the rest was history. And for once this one deserved the controversy. It is horrifying stuff. Once you've seen it it stays with you for good. It's litany of horror will scar your retinas and burn it's way into your head because unlike a lot of the other films on this list, this one is genuinely well made, well acted, shot on location and it beats us over the head with an important message.
But.
It's riddled with real life animal cruelty. A cheap and easy way to infamy and a fucking rotten decision by director Ruggero Deodato. He regrets it now but the damage was done. I'm not a big fan of film censorship but in this case I'll make an exception. A muskrat, a turtle, a pig, snakes and monkeys all die horribly in this and no one needs to see that. The version available in the UK is shorn of all it's animal violence and that's the one I'm rewatching. Because I'm not a cunt.
A film crew has gone missing in the Amazon rain forest and Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman, who was also a porn actor, trivia fans), an NYU anthropologist is out to find out what happened to them. Him and his guides discover warring tribes, animal butchery, horrible sexual practices and eventually a tribe traumatised by their encounter with the film crew. Gaining their trust and respect they eventually lead him to their remains and the footage they shot. Back in New York he and a group of news executives sit down to watch the footage to decide if it's suitable for broadcast and find it horrifying, full of murder, rape and staged atrocities committed by the film makers themselves. As the footage comes to a close they find out the filmmakers fates too. He realises that being civilised doesn't mean you're the good guy.
Cannibal Holocaust (it's second half anyway) is the film that put found footage movies on the map way before The Blair Witch Project and it uses that cinéma vérité concept very cleverly, putting us right in the middle of everything, making us identify with the villains and thus complicit in their violent acts. It's social commentary makes it the most intelligent of the nasties but its very guilty of indulging in the worst of their excesses too. The aforementioned animal murders, it's litany of misogyny, both from the tribes and the film makers that's shown in all it's prolonged gory detail. It's so lurid and extreme in places that it makes the penis severing scene from the climax seem like one of it's tamer moments. It's so realistic that director Ruggero Deodato was accused of making a snuff film and had to defend himself in an Italian courtroom by getting his cast to testify on his behalf to prove they were still alive. It's a film that still hits like a slap in it's cut version in 2020 so watching it uncut on release in 1980 must have been a right shocker altogether.
Would I recommend it. Yes but with some MAJOR caveats. If you do watch it, watch the BBFC approved version. Even then it still feels massively transgressive.
Does it deserve it's place on the list? Fuck yes.
Next - The Cannibal Man. Back to the dreadful films I go.
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