Review of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Anoop R — 12 Oct 2010

This is one of those films that was a near miss for me. That's the best way to describe it. It's gruesome, it's gutsy, and it's a tad campy.

I'm going to go ahead and say that if this movie had been made entirely as a mockumentary as The Blair Witch Project had been, then it might have been worth watching. In fact, the last act of the movie does try to be a mockumentary. Unfortunately, it kind of fails at this. I didn't like the characters involved at all. In fact, I straight up hated them. They were really cruel, and that made it straight up impossible for me to like them.

What was interesting about this, though, is that I could definitely see the parallels Cannibal Holocaust was trying to bring up between these cannibals and the plight of the Native Americans. And in that regard, the movie does work. In fact, this movie works best when it feels like it has a message it's trying to send--which it does every now and then. But it didn't do that often enough and to good enough effect.

Cannibal Holocaust has the reputation of being one of the goriest films ever made. In fact, it originally got a rating of NC-17 (though the filmmakers opted to leave the movie unrated) for its gore. And the gore is shocking at times. Gore doesn't bother me, though. And because gore doesn't bother me, it was really easy for me to see that this movie was trying to be shocking purely for the sake of being shocking. That was it. It wanted to shock audiences and for no better reason than to get a shock out of them. In some regard, I do suppose it works. I was shocked at times--but not because of the cannibals eating people. I was shocked to see the mutilation of animals that went on during this film. Whether or not the filmmakers disemboweled a tortoise or chopped the skull off a monkey I don't know. One of the strengths of the movie was the level of realism of the violence. But I can see this as a film PETA would go nuts over. And what's more is that there was absolutely no point. Sure it says something to see the characters chop off a turtles head and then watch them eviscerate it, but I have two problems with that. First of all, it made me really hate the characters (as I have previously described). Second of all, it felt very unnecessary. The audience doesn't need to see that. It takes away from the film instead of adding anything to it. If it was more central to the story, I wouldn't complain about it. But it had NOTHING to do with the story.

Besides all of that, the acting is really wooden, the dialogue isn't that impressive, and the editing felt a little choppy. I did enjoy the gritty feel of the movie, and I really did like the music. The music had a very upbeat feel that contrasted beautifully to some of the more horrifying scenes. For the most part, I really liked the way the film was shot. I just didn't like the overall execution of the film. This is truly what people call an exploitation film. It's all about the violence and has very little substance to it besides that. I cannot bring myself to recommend Cannibal Holocaust. Not because of the gore, but because of the weak execution.

4/10.