Ruggero Deodato

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) No one will ever mistake Atlantis Interceptors for a respectable film and that’s certainly part of its charm. It starts big, as an American crew tries to raise a Soviet submarine off the coast of Florida. But what they didn’t plan on is that (and that should tell you all about the film itself) the radiation from the wrecked submarine causes the continent of Atlantis to rise from the seas, encased in a big globe. Meanwhile, Atlanteans living undetected in Florida decide to trash Miami, making it eventually look like the Phillipinese town in which the film was shot. Whew. But here’s the thing: the film is so eager to deliver one thrill after another than the preposterousness of the plot becomes an advantage. Director Ruggero Deodato has a long trash-tier filmography, but he has a good hand on pacing here. Alas, let’s not get too enthusiastic: the dialogues, acting, special effects and production values are all horrible. Not that this should be surprising: There’s an entire sub-subgenre of terrible 1980s Italian-produced, American-acted, Philipinese-shot science fiction movies out there ripping off every single halfway-original idea even put on screen by Hollywood during that period. It’s certainly not good. But occasionally, it can be a moderate amount of fun. Atlantis Interceptors has a modest cult following, and it’s not that hard to understand why.

(In French, On TV, May 2020) Ugh, do I have to talk about The House on the Edge of the Park? It’s the kind of grimy low-budget exploitation film that quickly gets on my nerves: a home invasion that turns murderous. It’s clearly an exploitation film, and an ugly one at that. There is no fun to be had here—not in the gory violent torture, not in director Ruggero Deodato’s nihilistic tone, and not even in the nudity given that it’s always followed by something much worse. (See that straight razor on the poster? Yeah.) While it delves more deeply and frequently into eroticism than most other home invasion movies, it’s a misplaced fixation that is really not to the best of effect. There’s a twist at the end, but I don’t really care. Italian horror circa 1980 could be dynamic and inventive, or it could be stomach-churning and depressing. The House on the Edge of the Park clearly belongs to the second category.

(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.