Cannibal Holocaust (1979)
Today was one of those days that I decided to tie up a bunch of nagging loose ends. After moving to this great state six years ago, I finally went and got myself a driver's license. I had been avoiding doing it because I heard something about taking a stupid written test and since I had a valid license from my old home state, I was outraged that that wasn't good enough.
I mean, the state I moved to was several steps down from the one I came from. They only finally got around to outlawing bestiality recently, so I figured I would suck it up and take their test. If they can change, so can I! Well, it turns out that when they weren't fretting over the sex lives of trailer trash and their dogs, they went and changed the law so that I didn't have to take any test!
I did have to identify several road signs, but I was sitting behind some old geezer who was taking the same test, so I knew what road signs were going to be on the test. Needless to say, I impressed the dried up old prune when I correctly identified that one sign with the stoplight on it as a "signal ahead" sign. The "do not enter" sign was also an easy one (which the old man missed!) since it's tattooed on my ass.
The next thing I did was to go get a nail taken out of my tire. It had been in there for the last three months causing a slow leak and I was just too lazy to take it to the shop to get it fixed. Instead, I would just go down to the local gas station and air it up every day. I also shaved, got a haircut, and bought one of those plastic inserts for my wallet where your important documents go. (Like a spankin' new driver's license!) I even managed to hang around at work long enough for the secretaries to buy me lunch for Boss' Day.
All of these things turned out pretty good and were not nearly as trying as I had feared. When I got back home, I pointed my finger at Cannibal Holocaust and said "you're the last thing in my life that I've been putting off doing before the big man upstairs punches my ticket, so let's see if you gots what it takes to run with a feller who's riding on fully inflated tires!"
Now I had been avoiding watching this one for awhile. Since a few years back when I watched Cannibal Ferox one Super Bowl Sunday to be precise. We all remember that jungle turd, I'm sure. Something about some slugs trekking into the Amazon, abusing the natives and then getting abused themselves in return. That movie from Umberto Lenzi had plenty of Italian-style gore, but does that stuff really bother anyone anymore? We've seen it so often and mainstream movies have taken to showing a fair about of graphic violence so that the shock of seeing some ugly native make mud pies out of pig guts doesn't hold the "allure" that it once did.
The real problem I had with that movie, other than the standard complaints of shoddy production values, bad-porn acting, and predictable story, was the violence against animals. For some reason, these movies seem to feel that their movie will be more outrageous and controversial if they really kill some poor jungle creatures whose only mistake was to run into some Italians in the Amazon. It's disgusting, it's indefensible, it's lazy, and it doesn't add anything to the story except to jar you into loathing a movie on a basic level that transcends that fun kind of loathing you usually reserve for bad Italian gross-out movies.
So, even though I had copies of this movie, Eaten Alive, Jungle Holocaust, and Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals laying around, I purposely avoided watching them. I had no desire to see any movie where people traipsed through a jungle tearing the heads off of monkeys, hearing the squeals and cries of whatever animal is getting sliced opened or watching some creature's legs twitch as it dies in what basically amounts to a throw away segment that only serves to set up some scum director's idea of "atmosphere." But my day had been going pretty well, so I thought if there was ever a time to get back into the jungle cannibal genre, today was that day.
Okay, long story short: it turns out that no day is that day. This time your offending Italian is Ruggero Deodato who also made Jungle Holocaust and he proves just as adept at making a morally repulsive film as Umberto Lenzi was. Ruggero's movie somehow manages to actually be worse, because he tries to cloak all his murderous shenanigans as some type of commentary on the modern world and the primitive world (Yes, at the end of the film, one of the guys wonders who the "real" cannibals were: the film crew that abused the natives or the natives that abused the film crew. Uh, how about the morons that made this and pretended that all their animal killing was some type of commentary on the state of the modern journalism?).
There's something in this movie to offend everyone and nothing to entertain anyone. Animal killings, rape, abortion, and worst of all, way too much male nudity! Like I wasn't sickened enough seeing this poor tortoise laid out on its back and having its head whacked off and then having to watch as they tear its shell off and play around in its innards, I also had to watch some guys standing around with their tallywhackers hanging out like they were from Arkansas or something!
The set up for the "story" is that some guy from New York is sent off to the Amazon to try and find out what happened to a documentary crew that disappeared into what several people call The Green Inferno. The movie is structured somewhat oddly with the first half of things following this guy trying to find out what happened to the first film crew and the second half concentrating on checking out the footage recovered in the Amazon from the first crew. The movie was worthless, but it wasn't helped any by this "two movies for the price of one" gimmick.
We spend forty-five minutes watching this guy run around with his guide and their sidekick and they try and make friends with various tribes in an effort to figure out what became of that infernal film crew. The guide is one of those gruff, grubby types that swears a whole lot and is able to recognize the remains of one of his badly decomposed buddies by looking at his teeth. He's about the only thing that passes for humor in this movie and he's barely played for laughs as it is.
Our professor, who is supposed to be looking for that film crew, does stuff like throw up when he sees something gross happen and decides to get naked in an effort to gain the trust of one of the local tribes. Somehow or other the tribe wasn't intimidated by his undersized member and he ends up being guided to the elusive tribe called the Tree People.
They all live in some type of tree house that you might expect to see in Swiss Family Robinson, but unlike the Robinsons, they offer our naked hero some chunks of cooked humans. I wonder if that was as tasty as the gruel that was puked up by the native women that he also had to eat?
He manages to trade these natives his gun and tape recorder for the canisters of film that remain from the first group of people. He takes them back to New York where these TV types want him to host a documentary about the film. He's a little leery of doing it since he hasn't seen all the footage, so we fire up the projector and spend the remainder of the movie watching the footage purportedly shot by that film crew.
The film crew is made up of three scuzzy guys and one skanky broad. Subtlety is clearly not one of Ruggero's fortes as he instantly paints these people as the spotlight craving slugs all TV people clearly are as they constantly babble about how famous this trip is going to make them. The stupid part of all this is that they aren't even portrayed as driven professionals willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. Instead, they act more like rowdy frat boys let loose with daddy's movie camera, more interested in documenting the shower of their female crew member than anything else.
These characters behave so outlandishly that any point Ruggero was trying to make about the "cannibalistic" nature of the media is lost amidst the pointless raping and killing that these goons carry out in the jungle. By the time the natives get their revenge, you don't really care beyond the fact that it means the movie will be ending soon.
The natives rape, castrate, decapitate and do what ever else they do to kill time in the jungle to the film crew and when it finally ends, the film is so shocking that the TV people order it burned - some things are even too much for the human refuse that are TV executives. There's a pointless bit of text before the credits roll about how the projectionist stole the footage and sold it. I guess that's supposed to give it that "real" feeling, though watching the credits roll and seeing the name "Lamberto Bava" among the crew should dispel that notion in a nanosecond.
The remastered DVD from EC Entertainment does look very nice, giving you a much better picture than you would expect from backwash like this. They also have some interviews with Ruggero, including an embarrassingly inept one conducted by his son. This is where you get your biggest laughs as Ruggero refers to himself as a "craftsman" and laments that he would like to do a sequel if only he find a story as unique and special as the one in this film.
On the plus side, he does explain how he achieved that effect where the woman was impaled on a pole (it involved a bicycle seat and some balsa wood). Unfortunately he never does explain how he achieved the effect where he pretended to make a movie about anything beyond inflicting meaningless violence on forms of life obviously higher than himself. I hope everyone involved in this repulsive exercise got dengue fever or at the very least, malaria. I'd even settle for the runs.