Review of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Allan C — 22 Jun 2010

This is a great movie for the whole family to watch while eating dinner. Haha just kidding. I've known about this movie for quite a few years and I finally got the chance to watch it. It's a classic cult film deserving of its status.

The film is interesting in itself, but the history behind the movie is just as interesting. The movie uses meta fiction, almost like The Blair Witch Project and Fargo, but this one makes you wonder more about what is and what isn't real and how they did some of the stuff in the movie.

This one fuses a few different plot lines, which I was shocked to see because I thought it was just going to be a full on torture movie. I was shocked to see how smart this movie was. One story line follows some young people who go into the jungle to film documentary footage about a cannibalistic society.

One other plot line follows anthropology experts who look for the aforementioned documentary crew when they do not return home and the final story line follows big wigs at a television studio who watch the footage taken by the documentary team and decide whether or not it should be shown to the public.

This movie exhibits an idea that was also explored in Day of the Dead: it is people who are the real monsters rather than our scapegoats (cannibals, zombies, etc.). This movie also works as a social commentary on the morality behind the media and our dog eat dog society which preaches the survival of the fittest.

This film also might just be the most violent and sadistic movie I've seen. It features actual violence and cruelty to animals. Turtles, snakes, pigs, and monkeys were actually killed and tortured during the course of the movie in disturbingly graphic fashion.

In addition, there were plenty of gruesome torture scenes performed on humans, but those ones were obviously not real like the animal scenes. However, none of that should really matter if you enjoy gore and have a strong stomach, like I do.

This is an entertaining and controversial cult classic with social commentary and plus if you can get through the movie in one sitting you'll have some bragging rights.