Heading into an area of the rainforest where too many people have ventured into only to never be heard from again, Monroe (Robert Kerman -- of Debbie Does Dallas fame) doesn’t find many volunteers and his expedition is pitifully small as only he and his two guides, Chako and Miguel (Salvatore Basile and Miguel somebody as himself, apparently), will make the trip. And to get to where Yates was planning to go, they first need to traverse through the Yacumo Indians’ territory; no simple task all by itself. But with a captured Yacumo hostage in tow to barter safe passage with, they head off into the jungle -- where if the flora doesn’t kill ya, the fauna will happily oblige to polish you off. And things don’t look too good for our missing film crew when, while following their trail, which is about as easy to follow as General Sherman’s path through Georgia, one of the first things the rescue party stumble upon is the near skeletal remains of Yates' guide, Felipe.

Pressing on, they next stumble upon a grisly scene along a muddy riverbank where a Yacumo is in the process of graphically dispensing some tribal punishment on his philandering mate (-- played by the production’s wardrobe mistress because none of the locals would agree to do it, and you’re about to find out why --) by staking her to the ground and making sure … jeezus, making sure Tab-A can no longer slip into Slot-B by packing it full of mud, sticks and rocks. GAH!!! Monroe watches, appalled, and wants to put a stop it but Chako won’t let him. Their own survival depending on not interfering, he has to hold the Professor back at knife-point until the victim is bludgeoned to death, finishing the ritual; which kinda makes that other part … never mind. Logic or mercy has no place or meaning here -- or at least in this film, and believe me, it’s only gonna get worse.

Following Mr. Congeniality back to the Yacumo village, Miguel handles the prisoner exchange rather deftly, meaning the three outsiders get to keep breathing, but you get the sense that the natives aren’t really keen on their presence. In fact, the Yacumo Chief kind of goes of his nut, ranting and raging at them, moving around a large burnt-out hut, pointing out the skeletal remains scattered in the ashes, and several wounded tribesman buried up to their necks in therapeutic mud along the river. Monroe pieces it together that Yates’ expedition was probably responsible for all the damage, and this is confirmed by a few other signs that he has been there: a few film can containers, and one of them has a lighter that belonged to one of the lost film crew.  

Moving on and out of Yacumo territory, who happily point out where the invading film crew went next, the search continues into the even more dangerous territory of the Yanomamo and Shamatari, who, according to Monroe, “Are perpetually at war with one another … each considers the other fair game. Hunted, and then eaten.” And it isn’t long before they run into a Shamatari hunting party smoking their prey out of a tree -- and we shouldn’t be all that shocked or surprised when a humanoid shape falls out of the foliage to be bludgeoned to death, and then drug off to the river to be dressed out and cooked. As more victims are captured and prepared for the cooking spit, a Yanomamo rescue party arrives. Seizing this opportunity to ingratiate themselves to the “Swamp People’s” rival tribe, Chako and the others open fire on the Shamatari, killing several of them before running the rest off. The battle won, they’re taken to the “Tree People’s” village, where their Chief behaves just as squirrelly to the invading Anglos as the last guy. By now we have a pretty good inkling as to what's behind all the indigenous unrest and hostility, and it is here where we find out the final, grisly fate of Yates and his missing party when Monroe is shown a shrine made out of their bones, equipment, and film cans. But this isn’t the end of our story. No. In fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface. And before it’s done, we’ll be plumbing into some depths of brutality, vileness and perversion that will make what we’ve seen so far seem like the jungle safari ride at Disney World. And if you want proof, all you need to do is take a look at what’s captured inside those weather-worn film canisters…

Being the born and bred Great Plains Sasquatch that I am, during my rearing and formative years, I was often grouped with several other young Sasquatch in that other Great Plains agrarian staple: 4-H (Head, Hands, Heart and Hemorrhoids); kind of a more benevolent cross between the Hitler Youth and Captain Planet’s Planeteers. And it was during one of these get-togethers, back when I was around nine years old, while we toured a local, small-time meat-packing plant that I saw something … well, rather disturbing.

I don’t know if it was by design or just bad timing, but when the tour moved to the killing floor, a load of steers were in the process of being herded into a narrow alleyway and forced single-file into an elevated chute. What happened next … uhm, yeah; we were in a meat-packing plant after all. Circle of life and all that. Anyway, when the first animal was shut off and confined in said chute, there came the thunder of a nasty pneumatic punch to the skull, and then the brain-scrambled cow dropped like a skin full of rocks with nary a moo. Metal banged against metal, the side of the chute popped-open, and the ex-bovine flopped over onto the floor, legs straight up, for a brief bit of spasm while its bowels evacuated. And then, in a startling display of choreographic efficiency, the carcass was beset upon by three cutters armed with chains, metal hooks, knives, and more nightmare inducing air-powered tools. And as those tools ripped, rattled and roared, the blood and viscera flew, rapidly reducing the animal to its basic component parts. In a matter of a few, furious minutes, the carcass was decapitated and split open up the belly, from stem to stern; completely skinned, disemboweled and dismembered; the hooves, head and hide all going in opposite directions -- nothing was wasted, our tour guide assured, even the gelatinous mass of entrails messily transferred into a large vat. When the butchering stage was completed, the majority of the meat was lifted via those hooks and pulleys and then trollied off into another room for further processing.

And believe it or not, that wasn’t the disturbing part. Okay, that wasn’t the most disturbing part ... I’m getting to that if you and your stomach are still with me. Ready? Okay ... For as our tour moved on to the next step in the process, most of our eyes were transfixed by the cow’s bloody, dismembered head as we passed, eyes open, tongue protruding out stupidly, sitting upright on a large butcher’s block like some macabre museum piece. As usual, I was bringing up the rear, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who saw what happened next. Lingering a little too long, shell-shocked, and trying to properly process what I had just witnessed, one of the cutters saw me, took an air hose, stuck the nozzle in the bore hole in the skull and pulled the trigger. Blam! And with that, the resultant explosion of compressed air burst the eyeballs and blew them out of their sockets -- followed by several large chunks of bovine brain matter! And that still wasn’t the most disturbing part. No. The most disturbing part was the seedy look in that dude’s eye when he locked them on me; that, and the leering, shit-eating smirk on his face has lingered in my subconscious a lot longer than any exploding cow-eyeballs.

That little piece of carnassial childhood trauma came crashing to the forefront when I sat down and watched Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust for only the second time a few days ago; for the record, once more than I thought I ever would. I had first screened it back during my freshman year in college, and being the horror movie and gore-hound that I was back then, the film was spoken of reverently amongst my small clique of high school friends with similar tastes in films. Sure Dawn- and Day of the Dead were stomach-turning, we all said, but have you seen Cannibal Holocaust? … I heard they actually killed some animals on screen. No, someone else would say, I heard they actually killed, like, five or six people in that movie. Seriously? A snuff movie? No way. Yes way. Of course, none of us had actually seen it. And it wasn’t until college that I stumbled upon a copy, loaned to me by a newly acquainted fellow fanatic who had a penchant for wearing t-shirts emblazoned with fright-film atrocities on them, including several iconic images of the film in question, whose power to shock and appall was watered down by the frequency in which he wore them. A plain, unlabeled video tape went into my VCR. And yes, it took a few moments to psyche myself up to press the play button. Fear of the film’s rep, or fear that it wouldn’t live up to its rep, is open for internal debate, but the end result was the same: the movie knocked me completely on my ass. No, it wasn’t a snuff film -- but it was close enough. For in the end, as a viewer, if you have any kind of conscience at all, you feel as if you’re complicit in several deaths at worst, or rubbernecking at a fatal traffic accident at best, hammered home by the scenes of several animals being killed for the camera simply for their intrinsic shock value. And no matter how you look at it or try to justify it, you can’t. Speaking frankly, it sobered me up, cinematically, and there was no real need or desire to ever watch it or its ilk again.

Now, some twenty years later, a little older and a little wiser, I decided it was time to take another look at Cannibal Holocaust via Grindhouse Releasing's Deluxe Edition DVD. And not so much for the film itself, but for the extensive bonus features, including a new documentary on its production and several interviews with the director and cast. And just like I often wondered what exactly was going through that meat-cutter’s mind when he decided it was a good idea to blow a cow’s brains out in front of a nine year old -- as an added bonus on top of the entire butchering process! -- I was curious to see how Deodato would justify some of the cinematic decisions he made. Was this a director who believed in his message that this is what the public really wanted to see so strongly that he committed these animal atrocities to prove his point? Or did he film the atrocities to just amp things up, knowing he had a moral tucked into his back pocket to justify what he’d done. Or, like Herzog and Coppola before him, did the director just go a little light happy while location shooting in the jungle, develop a little malarial crotch-rot in the brain, and go off the deep-end in all that heat and humidity? Burning questions all, that I thought deserved some answers. But first, I convinced myself, I had to watch the film again.

Strangely enough, I had to psyche myself up all over again before grabbing the remote and punching play. The set-up for the film is quick, dirty, and fairly ingenious in its simplicity. Predating its found footage progeny by nearly two decades, Deodato neatly splits his film into two parts: the first deals with Monroe's expedition to find out what happened to Yates, while the second part abruptly shifts things back to New York after Monroe successfully barters a trade with the Yanomamo for all the film cans. Safely back in the PABC’s executive offices, Monroe is asked to coordinate and host a documentary and posthumous tribute to Yates and his final, doomed project. But Monroe isn’t an idiot, and you get a sense he knows what’s in those film cans. In fact, he encourages the execs to just drop the whole thing. When they offer they’ll just find someone else, he finally agrees to do it but only if they’ll let him screen the footage first, buying himself some time to change their minds. Since it will take awhile for the PABC’s lab to process and salvage as much of the footage as they can, Monroe begins to dig up some background information on the subjects of the piece. But his interviews go nowhere, and frankly, no one, family, friends or co-workers, has anything nice to say about any of them. More background checks find that Yates often staged some of the more lurid and violent aspects of his films on primitive cultures, including several executions and other sordid atrocities, and then Monroe’s worst fears are cemented when he sits down at the viewfinder in the editing suite and we get the first look at the footage:

We watch the reels chronologically; the quality of the film and filmmaking slowly degenerating as they get deeper and deeper into the jungle -- from clean, framed, and composed shots, to warped and washed out, jittery, scattershot, and out of focus, with chunks of frames missing altogether -- and the behavior of those behind the camera quickly follows suit. Things start out innocently enough; though from what we see of the four filmmakers in the staging bits, everything we've heard about them is true. Man, what a bunch of assholes; seriously, these guys definitely put the “ugh” in Ugly American. Anyway, into the jungle they go, armed with their cameras, machetes, and rifles, led by the aforementioned Felipe (Ricardo Fuentes). A large spider is the first to go, hacked and stomped to death for menacing Faye. Next comes lunch, and a large turtle is pulled from the river, beheaded, and then dressed out. And as the cameras lingered and lingered and lingered on the viscera and twitching flippers, to the remote I went, belching out some angry epitaphs, while mashing the fast-forward button. I stopped in time to see them breaking camp, and Felipe forgetting to check his boots for any lethal snakes. Oops. This is their guide? The others rush to his aid -- aid being a really quick triage and amputation at the knee to stop the spread of the venom, but it’s too late. Undaunted, Alan presses his troupe on, further into the jungle, and the first reel ends with them stumbling upon a group of Yacumo, munching on the remains of their lunch, sucking the brains out of some freshly killed monkeys. And to make it easier to track them back to their village, they shoot one of them in the leg.

Appalled at their attitudes and scorched-earth tactics, as the next reel spools up, Monroe can only boggle as Yates, his sociopathic tendencies showing badly, marches them into the unsuspecting village. Handing the camera over to Faye, she focuses on Yates, madness in his eyes, and while he spouts out some garbage about the laws of the jungle, Mark shoots a pig for no apparent reason. Yates then orders him to open fire on the over-matched Indians, and after rounding them up into a large hut, he gives the word to his cronies to put the torch to it. Then, as the structure goes up in flames and the natives scream and scramble to escape, Yates lets slip that he’ll edit the footage and blame the carnage on the evil Yanomamos. And then the reel comes to a close with the film crew forcibly occupying the village, engaging in some post-massacre nookie, and filming the lingering death of a horribly burnt villager while spouting some Hobbesian life-cycle B.S. before gawking at a native abortion rite, or as Alan refers to it, social surgery that ends with the fetus smothered in some mud and the mother bludgeoned to death.

Back in the editing room, the film editor confesses that Yates pulled this kind of crap everywhere he went: Africa, Cambodia ... you name it, he scorched it. Having seen enough, Monroe once more harangues the PABC execs to not only cancel the documentary, but to destroy the footage as well. They still refuse, not realizing the magnitude of the atrocities Yates committed, or don’t care, saying the sensational aspects of it are an added bonus that the public will eat it up. And really, How bad could it be? With that, Monroe has the solution to his problem and offers to show them the last two reels, raw and unedited, before they make a final decision. And as the execs settle into their seats in the screening room, Monroe knows these suits have no idea what is about to hit them when the projectionist fires up the film.

Having squeezed and tortured enough footage out of the Yacumo, the decision is made to not turn back and press on further, to find the elusive Yanomamo and Shamatari and the eventual fame that will follow. The filmmakers first make contact with a lone Yanomamo women near the river, capture her, and as Faye chastises them for wasting what precious film is left, the men keep the cameras rolling as they gang rape her. And when Alan moves to take his turn, Faye turns belligerent and tries to stop him to no avail. But as they all wrestle in the mud, and the camera moves wildly around, we spy several other natives watching in the weeds ... They’re not as alone as they think. 

As the PABC execs squirm in their seats the film abruptly stops, but then starts up again at a later point, leading to the most iconic image of the film: the party is on the move again, and come out of the trees into a clearing to find the girl they just raped dead, crucified, impaled on a tree entering her nethers and coming out of her mouth. (And I'm still not sure how in the hell they pulled this stunt off.) 

Lecherously leering at this perverse sight, when Yates is chided by Mark, who has to remind him that they’re filming, the documentarian quickly goes into a mock sense of shock and indignation at the body before him, blaming some ancient taboo or custom like we saw earlier with the mud-pie from hell ... Now, I've read a lot of reviews while researching this film, and all of them seem to agree, here, and think that the natives did this. Not me. Nope. Watch Faye during this scene. Watch as she glares at Alan...

Don’t you see it? Don’t you get it? Yeah ... And if that doesn’t make it clear enough, I’ll spell it out for you: No, I don’t think the natives did this at all. I think Alan and the moron twins did this after they were done with her, just like they’ve done everything else! And with that act, on top of everything else, I will agree with the other reviewers on one point: I am now actively rooting for the Yanomamo to wipe out these irredeemable pieces of @#%*.

And we don’t have to wait for long; for as the last reel spools up, Yates and his crew are on the run from a pack of avenging Indians. Soon out of ammunition, surrounded, and in some very deep doo-doo, true to form, instead of trying to help him or using the distraction to slip away, they keep filming when Jack is speared, caught, emasculated, dismembered, cooked and consumed. Those cameras are still rolling when Faye gets separated and captured next. And as she’s brutally raped by the entire Yanomamo hunting party for the camera’s eye, this finally seems to snap Yates out of his film-auteur funk; but Mark won’t let him help her, saying their priority is to get the film back to civilization. But it’s too late for all of them ... After Faye is beaten to death and decapitated, the last images we see as the Yanomamo overrun them is Yates’ bloody, lifeless face falling into frame.

When the lights come up on the shell-shocked audience in the screening room, the somber, silent mood lasts a few beats until the head honcho phones the projection booth and orders that all the negatives be burned immediately. Despite this victory, as Monroe leaves the PABC building, he openly wonders “Who the real cannibals are?”

The End

"Dear Ruggero, 

What a movie! The second part  is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world."

-- Sergio Leone

While perfecting his craft as a filmmaker, Ruggero Deodato learned from some of the best genre directors Italy had to offer and had a hand in many seminal Spaghetti pictures. Serving as an A.D. for the likes of Roberto Rossellini (Escape by Night), Antonio Margheriti (The Wild, Wild Planet trilogy), and Sergio Corbucci (Django), everything he gleaned from them is on display in this -- hard to call it, but it is -- his masterpiece, Cannibal Holocaust; a film that is easy to condemn for its faults, hard to like, and even harder to defend on its merits. And there are a few, and more than you'd probably think. Cinéma-vérité, verisimilitude, voyeurism, hyper-realism, call it what you will but this film has got it in spades. Aside from the animal snuff, and I’ll be addressing that in minute, the second half of the film is nothing short of brilliant filmmaking. Combining the hand-held camerawork of Sergio D'Offizi with the strangely serene and soothing elevator muzak of Riz Ortolani's soundtrack, there’s a sense of pure fusion of direction, cinematography, acting, action, and F/X in the found footage segments that just sucks you in. Powerful and provocative, the film grabs you by the bal—nose, and definitely holds onto your attention, and packs a hefty, resonating punch that will stick with you for awhile -- and linger long after its conclusion. Is it appalling? Yes. Is it hard to watch? Yes. Good. It’s supposed to be. In fact, the movie turned out to be a little too good/repulsive and Leone’s praise would prove strangely prophetic.

Approached by some German financiers looking for something along the lines of Ultimo mondo Cannibale a/k/a The Last Survivor, his first foray into the world of cannibal vomitoriums, Deodato and his crew headed back into the South American jungle for another go round. Plagued with cast defections (-- Yorke was a last minute replacement), cast acrimony, and cast rebellion over content, a lot of rain, and malfunctioning equipment, from all accounts the production was a logistical nightmare and far from a pleasant experience. Undaunted, and inspired by the exploitive Mondo films of Jacopetti and Prosperi, which graphically depicted strange rituals and animal mutilations from the darkest corners of the world, the director had a vision, and apparently no boundaries, or self-restraint, and he stuck with it -- and the rest is filmmaking infamy. Then, like any good exploitationeer, to add to the lurid nature of the film, it was planned from the beginning to market and promote it as being based on real life events, including a disclaimer at the beginning, claiming "For the sake of authenticity, some of the sequences have been retained in their entirety" and a footnote at the end, saying the projectionist was fined $10k for smuggling Yates’ footage out and selling it instead of destroying it. To play up that angle, all the actors involved had to sign a contract which stipulated that they couldn’t work for one year and basically disappear from the public eye. All part of the plan -- a plan that was about to go completely awry. For upon its completion and release, the film opened to huge crowds in its native Italy and continued to do so for the next ten days -- until the movie was seized by the courts and Deodato was arrested and charged with obscenity and several counts of murder. 

Now, there’s an old saying that there’s no such things as bad publicity, but things had definitely back-fired on the production. Seems certain sectors felt that they had a bona fide snuff movie on their hands. (And for the record, several cast members actually felt their days were numbered while filming.) And it’s easy to see why. On top of the animal cruelty, Aldo Gasparri’s pig-intestine fueled make-up and grue effects hold up remarkably well, and when you combine that with the savvy way the footage was captured and edited together it isn’t that much of a leap. Eventually, after producing his actors and revealing how the F/X on the impalement scene was pulled off, most of the charges were dropped -- except for the ones on animal cruelty -- but the film remained banned in Italy for almost three years until everything was cleared up. And it ran into similar problems around the world, and still remains permanently banned in some countries for its tone and content. But not in the good old U.S. of A. No sir, here it was ballyhooed for that very banishment.

Which brings us to the 900lbs. gorilla lurking in the room that can't be ignored when discussing this film. One of the better arguments I've heard on the subject was that at least these despicable acts of cruelty served some narrative purpose. These weren't cutaways -- like Sergio Martino prodding a monkey into the waiting jaws of a python in Slaves of the Cannibal God -- but were generally plot specific; most were killed for consumption, while others projected a threat. And that argument does hold some water for awhile, but then it starts to leak when you think about how long that scene with the turtle lasted, and then its completely scuttled by something found in the production stills that was alluded to in the film where a caiman and an anaconda appear to be going after each other that didn't make the final cut. Was this another lost scene due to malfunctioning equipment like the notorious piranha sequence? Where the Yanomamo go fishing using a captured Shamatari warrior as bait? Who knows.

Which begs the next question. Was it even necessary? Wouldn't the film be just as effective without it? The answer to both is no. The film is good enough to stand on its own but let's not kid ourselves. I won't sit here, all indignant and self-righteous, and lie to you. Yes, the film would still work but it would not be as effective without them as it was with them. I'm also not a hypocrite. Would this review be better with or without the slaughterhouse anecdote? Overkill? You bet, but it definitely got your attention, right?

Don't get me wrong. What the director did was abominable, but he did it and, right or wrong, it does have an impact. And sadly, it's getting harder and harder to condemn his actions these days when you can tune into Animal Planet or Discovery and basically see the same things or, worse yet, watch some adrenaline junkie getting his rocks off in the name of teaching us some outdoor survival skills -- you know, in case you ever find yourself lost in the Serengeti. Please. I caught part of one the other day, when one of these idiots was rooting around the Everglades, where he caught, killed, and cooked a turtle in its shell. All in the name of education, folks. Seriously, What the hell?!?

I honestly don't know what this current generation of genre fans would make of a movie like Cannibal Holocaust. Though I'd like to think that it would hit the Saw and Hostel fans like a twenty-ton anvil, in these days of hardcore gore and torture porn with the likes of Fred Vogel's August Underground and Mordum, and the Japanese Guinea Pig series, readily available, and we're not even getting into what you can find and watch on the internet, I highly doubt it. Have we finally reached a point in cinema history where Cannibal Holocaust could be considered quaint? Frankly, just the notion of that is more than a little spooky. I don't think we're quite there yet, and I think Cannibal Holocaust is one of those movies that every genre fan needs to see at least once, or once every twenty years, and that will be enough. But if you choose not to, I don't begrudge your decision at all. I do like the movie, but its merits can't quite negate the animal snuff, which is why I gave this the Dreaded 18th Amendment. It is what it is, and what it set out to be. And what it is is one of the most disquieting movies I have ever seen.

Since its release and the resultant firestorm of controversy, Deodato has never stopped apologizing for the film, but his reasoning and excuses seems to shift with the breeze. Either it was an indictment on the media and viewing public for focusing solely on the blood and carnage, or it was holding up a mirror to civilization and asking "What is it that really makes us civilized, and what happens when we lose it?" Valid criticisms, to be sure, but these become laughable when you try to bring in the "Clown Hammer of Morality" after all that death and carnage and apply it to this film. Which is why I go for option three, where maybe, just maybe, the director was simply trying to make the ultimate gut-wrenching cannibal movie to end all gut-wrenching cannibal movies, nothing more, and wound up pushing things too far. Over the years Deodato claims to regret some of the decisions he made for the film, wishing he'd done things differently, and at one point even claimed to wishing he had never made it, period. And he does so again in the aforementioned interviews and commentaries on the Grindhouse discs. And really, what more can he say? Regardless, whatever motive or moral objective he might have had while making Cannibal Holocaust is still up for debate, one thing is for sure: Just like author Upton Sinclair, Deodato might have been aiming for our collective social conscience with his jungle tale, but missed the mark, badly, and instead scored a direct hit on our gag reflexes.