Cannibal Holocaust
(1980) 95 Min.
Rated: Unrated. (nudity, excessive gore, sex, rape, genuine cruelty to animals*)
Country: Italy
Director: Ruggero Deodato
Starring: Robert Kerman, Luca Barbareschi
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
One of the first “found footage” films and also one of the most controversial. Documentary filmmakers set off to explore and antagonize the jungle.
* Real animal deaths on screen: A coatimundi, a turtle, a tarantula, a snake, a monkey, a pig, fish.
Synopsis:
The film opens with a television news report on a few missing documentary workers. The team was Alan Yates, the director; Faye Daniels, his girlfriend who is the script girl; and two cameramen, Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso.
A New York University anthropologist named Harold Monroe agrees to lead a rescue team and flies to the Amazon to meet his guides, Chaco and his assistant, Miguel. Along the trip they also take a native Yacumo hostage as a bargaining chip.
The group releases the native Yacumo hostage to the Yacumo in exchange for being taken to their village. The Trio win over the Yacumo and are offered to eat with them.
The trio head deeper into the forest and are able to save a group of Ya̧nomamö from another warring tribe. The Ya̧nomamö are a rarely seen “tree people” and live in a few trees. Monroe later decides to disrobe and bathe nude in the river, which prompts some tribal girls to play with him. They come across a skeletal totem that holds the camera of the missing crew. The tribal girls are afraid of it.
Monroe then shows the tribe his voice recorder and they are impressed. They share a meal of one of their dead warriors and in return Monroe is able to get the reels of film that the tribe had found.
Back in New York, Monroe appears on TV. The station promises to broadcast the found footage on television so that the world can see what is found on the reels.
Monroe goes to the editing room and starts to watch the reels himself.
The film plays as first-person found footage with inter-cut scenes in New York and Monroe.
The group in finds a large turtle in the river and kill it, slice it open and then roast and eat it. Later a venomous snake bites their guide and they try to chop of his leg and cauterize the wound. However, even after doing that the man dies.
The remaining group decide to trek on. They find the Yacumo tribe and decide to stage an attack, so they scare the tribe with guns and set the huts on fire with the villagers inside them. They film as much as they can.
Alan and his girlfriend Faye decide to have sex in front of a bunch of the tribe, mocking them.
The reels end and Monroe is disgusted by the treatment of the tribes, but the television executives ignore him. One of the executives tries to assure him that it’s not a big deal. Later he convinces the rest of the executives to watch the unedited footage.
The footage plays and record one of the tribal women left to die outside the tribe.
Another scene plays where the crew captures a Ya̧nomamö girl. She is pushed into the grass as the men take turns raping her. Faye claims it’s a waste of film and decides to stop them, but she’s pushed away.
The crew films the same girl impaled on a spike. Alan is told to stop smiling and he starts to feign disgust and say that the natives did this as a ritual.
Later the Ya̧nomamö start to attack them for raping and killing the girl. Jack gets hit by a spear and Alan decides to shoot him so that they can film what the natives do. The tribe begins to mutilate the corpse, cutting off his head, cutting the body in half and pulling out his intestines.
The Ya̧nomamö again attack the crew and manage to capture Faye. A few men of the tribe rape her and then she is beaten to death. They decapitate her.
Again the Ya̧nomamö attack and finally they get to Alan and Mark. The camera falls down and we see Alan’s bloody face fall to the ground in front of the camera, dead.
After viewing this footage the TV executives decide to burn the footage. Monroe is left to wonder who were the real savages.
Review:
Although this film tries to make a statement about how the media manipulates events and the rape of native culture, it seems to go about it by glorifying violence and death.
When the documentary crew are gathering the tribe to kill them, we too as an audience are “entertained” by the fake gore and real animal deaths. If the statement was to laugh at the media, the film should probably take a sobering look in the mirror.
What I found most disturbing was the animal deaths. In particular, the turtle, whose legs kick after its decapitation, the death cries of the pig. Most of the animals are killed for food, but some are just killed outright. The pig is shot by the documentary crew to prove how ruthless they are, but in reality the pig was shot during the filming of this film.
The level of gore in this film is about the same as you can see in any other gore-based horror. The rape scenes are, of course, unsettling.
I don’t think I’d call this a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly did disgust me. And since that is probably what the director intended, it met its mark. I can’t say it has any redeeming value other than the flimsy social commentary which really doesn’t make a strong impact when you recall the amount of violence and death in the film.
It certainly is an infamous film and will probably continue to spark controversy.
