Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

The simplified moral I came away with from this bit of celluloid is ‘Americans can be real jerkwads’. I know what you are thinking, that really isn’t something that the world doesn’t already know. Well maybe the world was a bit hazy on the point back in 1980.

It’s a movie about an anthropologist who goes off into the deep green jungle to find out the fate of a team of documentarians. The anthropologist finds the remains of the team, along with all the footage they shot. The footage is reviewed and it turns out the documentarians are a bunch of real jerkwads: killing the local fauna, killing members of the various tribes they encounter by gun and mass immolation, the occasional rape of some local lucky lady; you know, general dickholery. The natives eventually kill all members of the group one by one, most of it caught on film.

Most of the deaths of the humans seemed realistic, apt for the “real documentary footage” feel of the film within the film, but the error the director made was having the footage be all nice and spliced together. There were two cameras in the documentary crew and the footage the anthropologist recovered from the jungle was seemingly already through the editing room, rather than separate reels from the separate cameras.

The big negative that just completely distracted me for the length of the film was the killing of animals that happened throughout the “recovered” footage. 7 different species are killed on film, purely for the sake of the film. For a shitty cannibal movie like this, the director was seemingly scrambling for anything to gain some sort of notoriety. This kind of bullshit stunt erases any positives his movie may have accrued. I guess Italians can be real jerkwads, too.

0 Georges





Sidenote: There was a bigass billboard ad for J&B whiskey in the movie, staple of Italian horror of the 70s.