Jungle Holocaust (1977)
From what I've been able to gather from these cannibal movies, the actual presence of primitive tribes practicing cannibalism in today's world is pretty limited. My own extensive travels throughout the world (limited to the upper Midwest of these great United States) tends to confirm this, though there have been many times traveling on some back roads in Missouri that I've been hoping my cherry 1985 Monte Carlo wouldn't break down. I think though that the natives there would be more apt to sodomize you than to break open your rib cage in search of your pancreas, but that's still a bit too primitive for my liking.
So how is it then that if these vicious cannibals are invariably "the last of their kind" a "lost tribe" or "thought long extinct" that every stupid group of documentary filmmakers, reporters, fashion models, and businessmen manage to either crash land smack dab in the middle of their territory, or worse yet, mount an expedition that takes them straight into their stew pots?
I mean, when I watch movies like this, it makes me think that we should probably be bulldozing the rainforests and jungles as fast as we can and be putting up Econofoods and Targets there as a safety precaution. If these lost freaks that like to eat people aren't going to stay lost, then it's our duty to start civilizing these mostly naked bastards. Get them off their steady diet of humans, gators, and snakes and move them over to Jimmy Dean pork sausage, Pringles, and Lucky Charms. And maybe introduce them to napkins and silverware.
Let me get off my soapbox for a minute though and tell you about Ruggero Deodato's Jungle Holocaust. If you're like me, whenever you watch one of these movies from Italy, you need to refresh yourself on just which Italian hack filmmaker you're dealing with. I know that as I try to vainly remember whether it was Umberto Lenzi that directed Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox or both or none (actually only the later - but I had to look it up and write it down on my hand), all these guys tend to run together like so many goopy pig guts. Ruggero is, along with Lenzi, one of the best known directors in the jungle cannibal genre. In addition to Jungle Holocaust, he also made Cannibal Holocaust and another jungle related flick, Cut and Run. He also brought us House On The Edge Of The Park and the killer telephone epic Dial: Help.
Now that you know that you aren't dealing with some pretender like Michele Massimo Tarantini who tried to trick us into thinking we were going to see a real cannibal movie instead of the jokey, jungle adventure that Massacre In Dinosaur Valley was, should you be cringing at the thought of having to sit through ninety minutes of grim death, torture, and animal abuse?
Not necessarily in this case. You do get all that, but the movie itself is surprisingly involving (dare I say en-grossing?) as Ruggero approaches the story of businessman Robert Harper as one of survival and how Harper does whatever it takes to stay alive, ultimately committing the very acts that he once believed separated modern man from the primitives.
Deodato does well to forgo the usual formula of these sorts of movies where we have to follow a group of badly dubbed morons as they blunder through the jungle and get picked off in horrifying ways one by one before only the main guy and woman are left to try and escape, making it just a slasher film with exotic trimmings. Here, things start off inauspiciously enough with Robert and three other people on a small plane flying into the jungle to check out some business concern he's trying to get up and running there. No one on the ground answers their radio calls and the landing strip hasn't been mowed in a few weeks which causes the plane to lose a wheel on landing.
Robert isn't too thrilled with his workers and upon checking the camp finds it deserted. A search of the area shows evidence that his crew may have met their fate at the hands of a tribe of cannibals, so Robert and his three companions go back to the plane, the wheel having been fixed and decide to fly out in the morning when it's light out. One of their party has to go out and take a leak in the middle of the night and it's not long until you hear her screaming.
The next day, the pilot ends up impaled on one of those falling spike balls the cannibals always have tied in the trees for intruders and Robert and his remaining friend Rolf (Ivan Rassimov from Spasmo) decide they need to get back to the plane and get out of there before they're next. Their problem though is that the cannibals have chased them around so that they're lost and they end up building a raft to get them down the river that they think flowed passed the airfield. Robert and Rolf are ultimately separated when they go over some pretty nasty rapids and Robert ends up a prisoner of the cannibal tribe while Rolf has completely disappeared.
The middle part of the movie where Robert is held captive by the tribe at once hews closely to the conventions of these sorts of movies, but also manages to go beyond the expected scenes of carnage. So you are treated to various scenes of animals being slaughtered and some gore, but it's not omnipresent or done purely to shock so much as to illustrate what Robert was going through and what caused him to descend into savagery by the end of the film.
Fancy-types could make the argument that the movie was showing us the old "we're all savages underneath our modern visage" and that the cannibals stripped away this guy's present-day sophistication with their mounting humiliations and depraved acts. Regular guys like me that only care about where the next longneck is coming from at my local honkeytonk will tell you that even though the movie is great at stripping away this guy's industrial age veneer, they didn't have to do it literally so that we had to watch poor Massimo Foschi run around with his dingus hanging out for most of the movie. I also could have done without the kids in the tribe urinating all over him as well. I don't care how primitive your culture is, that just isn't polite.
Some of the movie's best stomach churning moments have nothing to do with the gore as both us and Robert wonder why they haven't simply killed and eaten him. He figures out that because he came in on the airplane, they think he's like a bird and can fly. This results in some queasy scenes where they hoist him up to the top of the enormous cave they inhabit and then let him drop free-fall style until he almost crashes on the ground. Who knew that the bungee jump was invented by a lost tribe of jungle cannibals? He survives that and is thrown in a cage with some birds and wonders what they're going to do with him.
Every now and again, one of the tribesmen comes in and takes a bird and Robert finally sees what's happened to a hawk that was taken when the tribe brings in a big alligator or crocodile and they slit it open and pull out the hawk. "Ohhhh," he thinks. "I'm going to be used as bait." This is when he decides that it's time to get primitive on these jokers and grabs a good sturdy rock and pulls the old possum trick. When a couple of these guys come in to investigate, he smashes their heads in with the rock and escapes, taking along a woman from the tribe that he saved from being raped. He keeps her tethered to him and rapes her himself once they've escape the tribe and are out in the jungle, more evidence of his slide back into savagery.
She stays with him though, even after this and without being tied to him, and shows him how to get rain water from plants and scrounges up edible berries and fish and they make their way through the jungle at once trying to stay out of the clutches of the cannibals and also trying to find the plane. It's during a rainstorm when they're seeking shelter that they run into Rolf again. Physically, he hasn't fared as well as Robert, his knee grotesquely infected, but mentally, it's clear that Robert has been the one to suffer the most, babbling on and on about a mansion back in California with really good food. Rolf holds up a bat telling him that he's eating bat meat and to keep his head together. Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure that'll help Robert's mental state. Nothing like a nice batburger to settle you down.
Robert's ultimate act of becoming those that he has struggled against takes place shortly before they get back to the plane. The cannibals are right on top of them and one of them goes out to meet Robert for battle. Robert manages to fend off the blows of this guy's club long enough to stick him with a poisoned spear, killing him. As the rest of the tribe looks on, Robert grits his teeth, opens the guy up with his knife and yanks out some vital organ and starts eating it, making sure the cannibals are watching. For the rest of their trip to the plane the cannibals follow at a distance, somewhat cowed by what they've witnessed, while Robert is pleading with the barely alive Rolf to tell him that Rolf would've have done the same thing if it were him.
A surprisingly gripping account that mostly fulfills the icky promise these cannibal movies usually fail so dismally at. Of the high profile Italian jungle movies including Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, and Eaten Alive, Jungle Holocaust is far and away the best of the lot. The decision to concentrate on a single man, his fears and uncertainty as to his fate, the things he has to endure, and the acts he has to commit in an effort to stay alive transforms what could have been simply another crummy collection of special effects shots and animal slaughter footage, into something shocking - a story that horrifies you, but doesn't gross you out. Massimo Foschi let's all hang out (literally) and impresses with a performance that gets across Robert's changing character with very little dialogue and wide-eyed looks that go from shock, to haunted, to numbed.
The Shriek Show DVD gives this movie its due with a package that includes interviews with him and Ivan Rassimov, the expected art and picture galleries as well as an audio commentary from Deodato. He also introduces the film and explains that he and the actors were against the animal shots in the movie that they were inserted against his will by the producer later on. Boo to that producer!
And if you pick this DVD up and wonder the devil it seems so much heavier than other DVDs, it isn't because the content isn't the normal lightweight garbage for a change, its those ten German lobby card reproductions from the movie they threw in for you! And since all the pictures featuring Robert are taken when he had finally acquired a loincloth, you can feel comfortable framing them and hanging them in the living room!