Review of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Dan C — 26 Nov 2013

An excellent horror movie, in the truest sense of the word. With the onslaught of rapes, murders, and real-life animal killings (and of human beings, in the film-within-a-film The Last Road to Hell), Cannibal Holocaust is truly a disgusting spectacle.

Its technical shortcomings are masked by the genuine slaughter and the verite style; it's also helped by its sober tone, which in my experience, is an achievement most Italian horror directors are incapable of.

But what exactly, beside the animal and pre-recorded guerilla killings, makes this more reprehensible than most horror movies? It definitely goes for the throat in a way few horror flicks do. It simply does not stop where most viewers would wish it to.

It leaves little to nothing to the imagination. It is openly misanthropic, depicting people gleefully committing atrocities. The evil is not restricted to a boogeyman or a creature or an international cabal of rich people who kill for sport.

It's really everybody: the film crew, the natives, the TV execs who even after witnessing a brutal rape of a native girl, still want to broadcast it. It's not a particularly fun movie, which, given the cirumstances, is apt.

But perhaps that's part of the reason it's so reviled: this is not just the Id out for a stroll, another 90 minutes of bloodletting, breastmeat, and ridiculous coincidences. Few horror movies, or even movies in general, dramatize man's inhumanity to himself as well as Cannibal Holocaust; one's feeling after watching it is not the satisfaction of a slightly transgressive frolic, but of utter desolation.