Mondo cannibale [Cannibal World] (2004)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2021) As much as I truly loathe to find anything nice to say about the infamous (and reprehensible) horror film Cannibal Holocaust, the universe has a perverse sense of humour, and today’s offering (via a scheduling mistake at the not-always-competent French-Canadian horror Cable TV channel) is Mondo cannibale, a 2004 film from shlockmaster Bruno Mattei determined to ape 1981’s Cannibal Holocaust but with even less wit. The plot is the same, as journalists head into the upper Amazonian to film cannibal tribes, and realize that they can’t just watch without being in mortal danger. The troubling “aren’t viewers the real monsters?” subplot of the original is here hammered so often that it becomes stale and then almost comic. As for the stomach-churning gore, well, there’s plenty of it—although it doesn’t seem to be filming the killing of real animals, so that’s at least one way in which the film is infinitely preferable to the original. Still, this is a terrible, useless film. Aping the cannibal movies of the early 1980s is in no way an achievement worth celebrating—skipping Mondo cannibale entirely is a wiser course of action. And don’t mistake this assessment for any kind of endorsement for the original.