Review of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Al M — 20 Aug 2010

For starters, you should probably not watch Cannibal Holocaust. Unless you have a strong stomach and a desire to see the most transgressive films ever made, Cannibal Holocaust is not for you. Honestly, it is not a film that I can watch very often.

That being said, Cannibal Holocaust represents one of the finest pieces of horror/transgressive/exploitation cinema ever made. It is an all-out, unrelenting assault upon the senses that shreds taboos, destroys values, and decimates any hope that humankind can ever be considered good. In many ways, Deodato's film is as nihilistic as films come, but it simultaneously can be read as a critique of the division between culture and savage. It is more primal than any film you will likely ever watch and engages with the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss in a way that few other texts can.

Cannibal Holocaust features a film within a film, and it is the first film to really use the idea of found footage: the first person style film-making that would become more famous in The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, [REC] (or its American remake Quarantine), Diary of the Dead, or Paranormal Activity. It is an ambitiously intellectual film that simultaneously criticizes exploitative cinema while being one of the most famous examples of that genre.

There are numerous examples of the cannibal genre from the early 80s, but they all pail in comparison to Cannibal Holocaust. No act is too awful to appear in the film: evisceration, ritualistic rape, ritualistic abortion, cannibalism, animal cruelty, and other forms of torture that no words can really describe. Its images of violence are so powerfully convincing that Deodato was required to present the actors and actresses before a court room to prove they had not actually been murdered. And the animal cruelty scenes are completely real, a fact that makes the film even more upsetting to watch and cast it in the realm of morally suspect cinema. And it is the animal scenes that so disturb me when I watch the film because they are relentlessly and unnecessarily cruel.

But Cannibal Holocaust is a film about cruelty--the cruelty that lies at the heart of the human condition. It is a disgusting film that in many ways I wish had never been made because its very production attests to the awfulness that lurks in our hearts.