Cannibal Holocaust

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST

By Jimmy Squarejaw

One of the worst days of my life was when fellow Fun With Horror writer Blake Redding and I naively rented Cannibal Holocaust to pass a random Saturday.  We thought it was just another feature in the long line of exploitative horror movies we had grown to love.  Soon we found out that wasn’t the case at all!  Instead we subjected our psyche to one of the most insane movies either of us had ever seen involving rape, cannibalism, excessive realistic gore, and multiple animals being horribly slaughtered.  That movie fucked a fold in my brain for weeks after until I broke down and bought the damn thing.  Now we’re both huge fans of finding the most disturbing images captured on film and celebrate our love for all things extreme every week with Sunday Snuff. 

*WARNING*

All movies reviewed for SUNDAY SNUFF contain graphic depictions that may include rape, live animals being murdered, and extreme gore.  None of the writers condone such acts we just watch this shit.

Well, for week one I have to review the king, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.  This movie is so extreme it’s hard for me to think of clever metaphors to randomly insert into this review. The story is about an anthropologist going into the Amazon jungle to find out what happened to a documentary film crew that disappeared months before.  The anthropologist hooks up with a local guide and assistant then venture into the jungle that is also known as “The Green Inferno.”  The group witnesses a ceremonial rape with a stone by a lone tribesman and follow him back to their village undetected.  Once there they cautiously build trust with the natives who were obviously traumatized by assumed hedonistic actions from the missing film crew.  The anthropologist eventually realizes all of the missing crew is dead after finding the remains of their bodies but now he has to retrieve the missing film canisters.  He comes up with a plan to show the natives a box that contains voices (it’s a tape player stupid natives).  Astounded they hand over the film reels because they fear the anthropologist can capture souls.

Now the first part of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST was insane but the second part is completely off the charts. Once back in New York the anthropologist sits in on a viewing of the found footage that a television channel plans to air as part of a documentary about the murdered film crew.  But what they don’t realize is the story told on the recovered reels is quite horrific.  The audience realizes that the film crew basically went power crazy in the jungle.  They started killing the tribes’ animals, burned down their huts, shot a few of the tribesman, two of them start fucking out in the open, and then they rape a few of their village women.  Wow!  Eventually the indigenous cannibal tribe has enough of their shit and decides to exact revenge on the filmmakers.  I won’t go into specifics, like usual, but the movie is so graphic that the director Ruggero Deodato was arrested for obscenity and then murder after a rumor got out that people were actually killed.

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is still top of the heap for me when it comes to intensity, and I’ve seen a lot of horrifying shit-hence Sunday Snuff.  The combination of realistic rape, violence, and multiple animals being brutally killed on film is a lot to take in for the casual viewer but there is a lot to be said for this movie aside from the shock. Every time I’ve watched this flick I become immersed in it even though I know what happens in the movie. 

Blake and Jimmy's Extreme-O-Gauge!

Faint of heart beware!

Rape:  5 out of 5 - Multiple explicit scenes of rape!

Realistic Gore:  5 out of 5 - Could pass as a snuff film!
Necrophilia: 0 out of 0 - Dead people get eaten not humped!

Animal Death:  5 out of 5 - A lot of animals die and it’s fucking sad! They are real, not props!

Torture: - 4 out of 5 – Not a pure torture kind've movie, but a lot of brutal killings!
Overall Movie:  5 out of 5, this is the Citizen Kane of extreme movies!