Monday, 5 July 2021

Cannibal Holocaust, 1980


Harold Monroe, an anthropologist and professor at New York University is asked to go to South America to find a film crew that have gone missing while on an expedition to film some indigenous tribes that are believed to be cannibals in the Amazon Forest.

The first part of the movie is Monroe, travelling through the Amazon and meeting up with the tribe who know about the film crew to which Monroe is inform they are all dead and that they had caused trouble when they were there. After gaining their trust and in one scene where he himself eats part of a human hand, he recovers the film crew’s camera and film cans which he takes back to New York with him.

Monroe returns to New York and hands the film to the TV company who ask him if he would like to help with the broadcasting of what they have put together from the footage. Monroe says he will, only if he can see the raw footage beforehand. He is shown an earlier documentary made by the crew before they disappeared entitled the Last Road to Hell, to which he is told by one of the executives some scenes were staged to make them more exciting.

Upon watching the raw footage, Monroe is disgusted as the film crew purposely antagonises the tribe into a frenzy of violence towards them which leads to them capturing their own deaths on film....

Cannibal Holocaust is one of the better known video nasties and one that definitely warranted being on the list! 

The film nearly got director Ruggero Deodato jail time as Italian authorities has thought it was an actual snuff movie.

When making the film he has made a contract with the film crew in the movie that for a year after the release of the movie they could not star in anything else to make it believable that they had died. This was quickly undone when they had to be brought to caught to prove that they were alive!

Also think what also made it believable was some of the special effects, especially the famous impaled tribes girl scene. The special effects team had to show the court how this scene was achieved, which was having the tribes girl sit on bicycle seat and they hold in her mouth some balsa wood to make it look like she was impaled!

A big problem I think for a lot of people is the brutal animal deaths that happen in the film, some clearly done for the sake of it. Robert Kerman who played Monroe says in an interview he was very much against this and threatened to knock the shit out of Deodato for it. Deodato later did say he wished he never did these things in the movie and on the blu ray from Grind House Releasing you can have the option to watch with or without the animal cruelty.

One thing that made me laugh is even though it is a very violent film in parts, Deodato said if he knew Robert Kerman was a porn star (he had did a few adult films as well as plays and normal films) he wouldn't have hired him. I just find it silly that as a director who made a lot of films with blood and guts etc... someone who did adult films sort of offended him!

Cannibal Holocaust still, in my eyes, holds up to be a brutal film which some would find hard to watch. Though in these days of the internet people have access to a lot of more real life violence that has been filmed and shared, to quote Monroe in the final minutes of Cannibal Holocaust, "I wonder who the real cannibals are..."

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