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It worked like gangbusters for The Blair Witch Project, which used its cinema verite premise as a marketing ploy. But in order to prove the unoriginality of Blair Witch's gimmick, you don't even have to look to the film that directly preceded it, The Last Broadcast. Both films were scooped twenty years earlier by Ruggero Deodato's notorious Cannibal Holocaust, which actually takes two narrative tracks. In the movie's first half, anthropology professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman, perhaps better known to some under his old-school porn alias R. Bolla) is tapped to go to the remote jungles of South America to find out what happened to four missing documentarians. After some fancy footwork in which he and his guides manage to impress the natives enough not to be eaten, Professor Monroe stumbles across a bunch of film cans hanging from trees. He makes it back to New York with the footage, and in the second half of the film the professor and the TV executives who want to air the footage watch the images with growing revulsion.

We do, too. Picked up in 2001 by Grindhouse Releasing (co-owned by Sylvester Stallone's son Sage) for a gradual cross-country crawl through art houses and festivals, Cannibal Holocaust has long been an infamous Video Nasty, pursued by gorehounds over the last two decades. But this film is hardly a fun splatterthon like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. It was among the first of the Eurocannibal flicks (others include Lucio Fulci's Zombie and Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox, aka Make Them Die Slowly), and it's backed not only by an upsetting cinema verite approach but by a Message. And a rather ham-handed one at that, spelled out for you at the end: "Who were the real cannibals?"

It's a fair question. Unlike Dr. Monroe and his guides — who enter the territory humbly but firmly, with a solid grasp of the native customs, and therefore survive — the four arrogant journalists blunder into "the Green Inferno," where three tribes co-exist not altogether peacefully. The documentarians seem less horrified than jazzed by the brutal primitive rituals they witness and, in some cases, set in motion by their own insensitive actions. Deodato is obviously scoring points on the media's complicity in the violence it reports on, a satirical sword taken up again by Man Bites Dog. In that Belgian gut-puncher as well as this film, the camera crew find the line blurred between subject and observer; they are drawn into hideous acts, given license by the situation to indulge their id. The crew in Cannibal Holocaust (three men and a woman) either perpetrate or are privy to mutilation, rape, and possibly murder. Those who can't handle rape scenes in movies, by the way, are advised to give this film a wide berth; it contains at least three such scenes, including a woman violated by a rock during a ritual designed to condemn adultery.

At first, white audiences might find the natives appalling. But they're only doing what they've done for centuries; their ways are sometimes barbaric by our standards, but then our ways might be barbaric by theirs, too. There's a bit when one of the crew members shoots a piglet for no reason other than swaggering spite; the natives might butcher animals — and, Christ, do we ever see animals slaughtered on camera for real — but always for food. The American journalists begin to act out their idea of native savagery, without the cultural context that might give it meaning. Three of the men on the crew gang-bang a screaming native girl; the woman in the crew looks on with distaste, but doesn't do much to stop the assault. Later, the crew proudly shows off the result of this rape -- the movie's defining image, the girl impaled by a spike through her vagina and out of her mouth. Was this the tribe's punishment of the girl for her defilement, or did the crew do it? It's ambiguous.

We keep going back to Dr. Monroe in New York, showing this footage to the gradually nauseated network execs. The final reel gives Cannibal Holocaust the shape of a particularly virulent revenge flick, and it delivers the revenge with a large helping of rage and disgust. The men are torn, literally, to bits; the woman is stripped and raped, then bashed to death with sticks and rocks. Intestines, genitals, gnawed body parts are scattered about the scorched green landscape. The end. A shaken network exec orders all the footage burned; a quietly despairing Dr. Monroe makes his way down to the New York streets, ruminating on the difference between savages.

And we've just watched it all, and what does that make us? "Cannibal Holocaust" may be the nastiest of the Video Nasties. It turns our voyeurism into horror, and then exposes our horror as hypocrisy.

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originally posted: 05/20/06 08:41:04
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