Part of the thrill of watching movies on the UK's "Video Nasties" list was finding copies of the films. Distributed on worn out VHS tapes and passed from friend to friend like some kind of unholy sacrament, these films were often shocking simply for the sake of it. Though I was only an infant during the release of these films and resulting moral panic, I did get to have a genuine Video Nasty experience as a teen. The film?
This image gives me both nostalgia and indigestion.
Though I viewed Cannibal Holocaust more than twenty years after its release, there was still a thrill of watching something taboo. Two of my best friends and I watched it on a weird bootleg on my buddy's laptop, sprawled across my basement floor and munching on popcorn. The popcorn munching lasted until the infamous scene with the turtle, for anyone who's curious.
The opening crawl isn't too intimidating. Music reminiscent of the openings of 70s family dramas plays while the cast and crew's names are displayed across helicopter footage of the Amazon. It's a false sense of security, however, because Cannibal Holocaust is one of the most notorious of all the video nasties.
The First Found Footage Movie
Capturing the important things on film, clearly.
We have Cannibal Holocaust to thank/shame for creating the found footage horror genre. The movie uses a frame narrative to show us the gory details of the deaths of a video crew in the Amazon. The film jumps back and forth between the "footage" from the crew and another crew interviewing family, friends, and those in the know back home. It's very similar to The Blair Witch Project, except with lots of actual on-screen death and, amazingly, less shaky-cam.
When the film starts, the crew has been missing for two months. Four Americans went into the Amazon to find out more about the tribes there, and no one's heard from them since. That's because...
...Everyone's Dead, and They Kinda Deserved It
The film crew are a bunch of spoiled white trust-fund kids who clearly don't have respect for anything. It's like someone sent the dumbest young VICE reporters right into the Amazon. When they don't get the footage they want, they decide to fabricate it.
And by fabricate, I mean horrifically murder the natives on-camera.
Sure, horrible things happen to all of the filmmakers in the "final reels" of their "found footage", but they haven't done anything to endear themselves to the viewers. It's hard to feel sorry for someone, no matter how awful their death, when they helped murder innocent children.
A Little Too Real
The film's director, Ruggero Deodato, wasn't exactly angelic, either. He forced the (unpaid) native actors to stand inside the burning hut and was (allegedly) abusive to cast and crew. Deodato got his own comeuppance in the form of legal troubles once he returned to his native Italy.
Ten days after the film's premiere, Deodato was arrested. The charges shifted several times, but at one point he was under investigation for the murders of the people in the film. The actors were under a contract to stay out of the public eye, so they had to be tracked down to prove his innocence.
They thought this guy let those "poor innocent" college filmmakers get eaten!
While Deodato was released and people realized that Cannibal Holocaust was only fake snuff, not the real deal, he did come under additional scrutiny for the film's treatment of animals. Five live animals are killed on-screen, including a pig, a turtle, and a monkey. The deaths are graphic and relatively prolonged, though the native cast did at least eat the various animals. That's cheaper than craft services, I guess?
Nasty Rating: 90, +5 for that poor turtle
Cannibal Holocaust is notorious for being one of the nastiest films ever made, and that notoriety is deserved. While some of the special effects are hokey, others are surprisingly effective, and there is more gore in this movie than you can shake a (girl-impaled-on-a) stick at! The animal deaths are sad and ultimately quite brutal, so if that sort of thing offends, this one's not for you.
For anyone interested in the controversial history of cinema, gore fans, or anyone who loves Italian exploitation cinema, Cannibal Holocaust is a classic. A truly disgusting classic, but a classic nonetheless.