Welcome To The Jungle: Cannibal Holocaust

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (Blu-ray)
Shameless

Release date: September 26th, 2011
Certificate (UK): 18
Running time: 101 minutes

Year of production: 1980

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Cast: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi, Salvatore Basile, Ricardo Fuentes

It’s probably the most notorious Video Nasty of all isn’t it? Just the name itself strikes terror, revulsion and the slightest bit of nausea deep within the throats of those who’ve never seen it.

Yet, to be honest, it isn’t as bad as it seems, at least not if you’ve prepared yourself by first watching Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) and then Cannibal Ferox (1981). At least, that’s what I did and even though the images are quite brutal, I found that Cannibal Holocaust had something to say rather than just something see.

It’s a story told in two parts. We have a New York anthropologist, Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman), who teams up with two local guides to go in search of a group of documentary filmmakers who’ve disappeared in the South American jungles.

Monreo comes face to face with tribes the rest of the world has never seen and witnesses some of their time honoured traditions, such as cannibalism and is even offered some of the local cuisine as well. Unfortunately, he also comes across the remains of the filmmakers as well as the footage they were shooting.

The second part of the story takes us to a different kind of jungle, where the local people are another breed of cannibals. In New York City, against the backdrop of the World Trade Center towers, we enter boardrooms and screening rooms with executives and studio bosses.

As we view the filmmakers’ footage, we begin to question who’s really barbaric here and metaphors like “life in the big city can really chew you up and spit you out” come to mind. We see how these filmmakers first lost their souls before they lost their heads, hands, feet and everything else in between. It’s not just them who are eaten alive, in a way it’s anyone who falls under the executives and studio bosses here whose primary goal is high ratings converted to big cash.

In light of the September 11th attacks, it’s always a startling and jarring experience to see the World Trade Center towers featured in films. We remember the images of the impact, subsequent collapse and the gaping hole it left in New York’s skyline and that’s perhaps why they had a much stronger effect on me here than the images of decapitation, disembowelment and general disfigurement of both human and animal bodies.

As a result, the controversial aspect of the movie is put into perspective and though it’s still horror, it becomes a commentary on specific aspects of society. Whether primitive or civilised, they’re both rampant with cannibalism, one literal and one figuratively speaking, of course.

It’s a thought provoking exercise in cinema and what Deodato has given us might be hard to stomach but is definitely worth a look followed by further discussion of how the insatiable need for the public to consume news, information and images goes hand in hand with the media and the entertainment industry’s equally insatiable need to continue supplying them. In the end, it’s Monroe who asks “I wonder who the real cannibals are.”