Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) I approached Cannibal Holocaust very reluctantly, acutely aware of its terrible reputation as a schlock gore horror film that actually kills animals on camera—I’m a staunch film preservationist and I’m jaded when it comes to horror, but if it takes deliberate animal death to make a film then I’m more than willing to let all copies of it vanish off a pier. It doesn’t take a long time to feel that Cannibal Holocaust is not worth the animal deaths that went into it: It’s a film that revels in gore, nihilism and voyeurism, getting its kick out of bathing everything in blood and death. The plot has something to do with American academics examining found footage from an expedition sent deep in the Amazon to study a cannibal tribe, and you can guess where it goes from there. There is some intriguing material here about the observers being corrupted by the nature of the terrible footage they’re seeing, but that idea is not really explored, nor is it the point of the film. The point of it is death and the gore, shown in as much detail as practical effects or ignorance of animal cruelty laws will allow. I’m not impressed by this entire film subgenre (regrettably, there are many similar movies) and Cannibal Holocaust does nothing to make me change my mind. It’s slightly better made than many others, director Ruggero Deodato is certainly not going for the easily dismissed quasi-comedy that some other similar films can evoke, and it’s definitely far more disturbing for including real animals being killed on camera. I’m a somewhat jaded horror viewer, but even I had to tap out and fast-forward through the animal cruelty sequences. Alas, this will probably mean that I will remember Cannibal Holocaust much longer than I should. (Fake the killing of a human and I’ll shrug, but kill a turtle for real and you’re my enemy for life.) And there’s something else: The film’s closing lines have something to do with the nature of evil … and then the camera pans up to show the now-destroyed Twin Towers.