The Italian genre directors were all friends or co workers in one way or another. Most had worked on projects together then went off to make their own films. What resulted was a fresh, exciting time in Italian cinema. The Italians were doing in the 70s what the French had done in the 60s, they took popular genres/stories we had seen before from Hollywood and put their own Italian spice on them. The most popular films were the pepla (Sword and Sandal movies), Spy films, Gialli (thrillers), Polizioteschi (crime), War films, Spaghetti Westerns, Sci Fi films and later on the Zombie and Cannibal films. Alot of filmgoers still look at 70s Italian genre cinema as cheap and schlocky but I really feel that these directors were some of the most brilliant of their time. They were daring, inventive and highly influential.

In 1979, Director Ruggero Deodato (who directed one of my favorite polizioteschi's: Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man) shot one of the most controversial works of genre cinema to come out of Italy. This film was called Cannibal Holocaust aka The Green Inferno. Deodato made the film as a response to the violence he saw so much on TV and also as a way to take a closer look at the journalists that were reporting about the events.

A group of four award winning documentary filmmakers that had gone on an expedition to record the tribal environments months earlier were never heard from again. An Anthropology Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) travels with a guide deep into the jungle to track them down and find out what has happened. What he finds in the process is two warring jungle tribes. Monroe and his guide Chaco (Salvatore Basile) watch the lifestyles of the tribes from a distance. This includes witnessing some truly horrific sights such as animals (monkeys, rats) being chopped up and the rape and killing of a female native. When Monroe is invited in to eat raw guts of an animal with one of the tribes, he finds some of the belongings of the four documentary filmmakers including the actual cannisters of film they shot, which the natives have saved.

Professor Monroe rthen eturns to New York City to look at the contents of the film to see what the filmmakers were up to, but what is revealed on these rolls of film is some of the most savage and brutal occurences ever seen by man. Professor Monroe screens the footage shot by the filmmakers to a group of producers and finds out that the filmmakers themselves were running amuck in the jungle and terrorizing the local tribes. We get to know the four filmmakers: Tina 'Faye' Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke), Jerry Anders (Perry Pirkanen), and Mark Tomasso (Luca Barberschi) through these film reels, but we see them as truly dispicable human beings. They burn a village, take part in killing a sea turtle (one of the most extensively graphic sequences in the film) they even rape a young tribeswoman, taking turns in a gang bang scenario. This sequence was reminiscent of the rape sequence in Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave (1978), another brutal film that was highly controversial when it was released. Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust shares much in common with that film because like 'I Spit', the film is both extremely disturbing and vile, and a brilliant piece of daring cinema.

After commiting their own atrocities in the jungle, the four find themselves trapped by the cannibal tribes and soon they are mutilated in very graphic ways including castration, decapitation and rape. These scenes are very hard to watch, but while you see these things happening you feel the filmmakers deserved payback for what they did. Another one of the main aspects I loved about this film is the music by Il Maestro Riz Ortolani. The score for this film works perfectly as it accents the horrific scenes. There is different cues that play, a strange, electronic throbbing noise and a beautiful but tragic theme which opens the films credits and plays over violent acts committed by the four filmmakers. Incredible!

The remoteness of the world is essentially gone. The spread of technology and information has cast a connected net (no computer pun intended), that with very few exceptions, spreads everywhere. But, I still remember a time when the world seemed to posses impervious, unreachable locales where few men had tread. Back then I could imagine there might be places that held exotic mystery, danger, and unseen wonders. Today? Not so much. These days Leo Dicaprio takes a trip via prop plane and raft into the heart of the Amazon to observe one of its most isolated tribes, only to have one of the tribesmen, who stills hunts for his meals, doesn't wear a stitch of clothing, or seem to posses any modern tools, point at Dicaprio and say, "Titantic!"

Way back in the far simpler days of 1979 (but released in 1980), Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust took the stance that for all the civilized world's superiority, modern man can still too easily fall into callous and cruel behavior. And, that he did it in a jungle/cannibal film, just goes to show why genre cinema has always been the best place to get your message flick mixed in with some good, cheap, vulgar, exploitation thrills.

Documentary filmmaker Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke), his girlfriend Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), two cameramen, and a guide disappeared while filming in the Amazon. Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) leads a small expedition into the jungle to find out what happened to them. Besides the inherent danger they face from nature, they venture into areas that are inhabited by warring tribes of cannibals, most notably the swamp dwellers, the Shamatori, and the elusive "tree people," the Yanomamo. As Monroe feared, Yate's documentary crew met a grisly end at the hand of the cannibals, however what he finds on the crew's recovered footage tells a far more disturbing story than he could have expected.

This is a very well known film, but I am still going to play coy with the details because it serves the film better for any newbies. Suffice to say, what starts out as a by-the-numbers cannibal/jungle film, changes in the last half where we witness the raw documentary footage of the Yates expedition and the film takes on a cinema verite air. As a matter of fact, that the last half was the obvious inspiration for The Blair Witch Project- the viewer is meant to not be sure if what they are seeing is real. The film was also promoted as such, using unknown actors, selling the idea that it all actually happened. What is also most noted about the film is its grue and gore, from tribesman performing ritualistic rape, abortions, castration, impaled bodies, not to mention the cannibalizing, as well as the films actual, all too real violence against animals, in this case a anteater-rat looking thing, a piglet, a turtle, and a monkey.

Now, I didn't find out about Cannibal Holocaust until the mid-late 80's and it took me a good number of years before I actually stumbled upon a fringe video store with an all day wine-drinking proprietor who stocked oodles of bootlegs and weird stuff. The one thing I've never quite wrapped my head around is that it came out in 1980. It feels so much like a post-Vietnam era grindhouse flick, that I always assumed it came out a good six to eight years earlier and some smart theater probably double billed it with Last House on the Left. Regardless if came after the first wave of disillusioned post-Vietnam cinema, Cannibal Holocaust is a definite reaction to those times.

Previous Euro jungle/cannibal films like Man From Deep River (1972) and Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) took the typical stance of being adventure-horror films depicting modern man lost among the primitives. Deodato wasn't content to just go for that. He had previously delivered another fine jungle film, Jungle Holocaust (1977, aka. The Last Survivor, The Last Cannibal World), that likewise explored similar themes and aimed for more then just entertaining thrills. While Cannibal Holocaust transports viewers to an exotic place full of strange customs and primitive behavior, the subtext takes a definite stab at the media. Again, that is why I say it feels like such a post-Vietnam film, because that was the first war where journalists exposed the horrors (and futility) of warfare and made it commonplace for ma, pa, and little Jimmy to sit around the tv at 6PM and see those atrocities right before their eyes. To hammer the point home further, one of the Yates crew can be heard saying, "It's just like Cambodia, man."

Cannibal Holocaust's history is filled with controversy. Aside from the real animal violence causing it to be banned in over fifty countries, it's fake violence proved to be convincing enough that Deodato was dragged into Italian court where he had to prove it was fictitious. He also went on tv talk shows with the actors in order to prove the Yate's crew hadn't met a grisly end in the primeval forest. He sort of paid the price thanks to film makers like Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who infamously manufactured stagy scenes and paid off villagers, tribesmen, and Congo soldiers to gain material and fulfill their sensationalistic agenda for mondo documentaries like Mondo Cane, Goodbye Uncle Tom, and Africa Addio. Even to this day, the film hit another blockade when Grindhouse had to go through a number of printers and accommodations because of the DVD artwork.

And, in a karmic way, I think Deadato deserved all the hassles he got. He did allow the animals to be killed. He did exploit the natives he filmed and perpetuated a stereotype about them that is far from the truth. In that sense, despite any "message" the film might have, he is still no better than any other mondo doc or exploitation jungle film makers like Lenzi, Martino, Jacopetti, or Prosperi.

I say all that, and I really like the film. Without a doubt, the film's content and method is questionable, and those that abhor violence and cruelty to animals have every right to object to the film and flat out should not watch it. However, part of being a human being is that one can make allowances in their art and entertainment. Some things are a product of their time, and I'd no sooner totally damn Cannibal Holocaust than I would Birth of a Nation. And, hell, Robert Mapplethorpe's subject matter might not always have been pleasant, but damn if his compositions werent pretty. You can sort of say the same here- I don't condone everything I see onscreen in the film, yet, as conflicting as it may seem, I think the harsher material does artistically further the film as a work of shock cinema.

Not to make light, but like the Pope said about Passion of the Christ, "It is what it is." To complain about a cannibal film being disturbing and distasteful is a bit like complaining about a musical having too much song and dance.

A crude monument fashioned from the remains of the previous expedition and pieces of camera equipment is discovered. Cannisters of undeveloped film are retrieved from the cannibals and taken back to New York.

There the shocking truth of the filmmakers' exploitation of the natives is revealed. They were sadistic, vicious, and bent solely on what spectacular sights they could capture on film.

This is possibly the most disturbing film ever made.

Such behavior is still commonplace, and it is from this rich literary tradition that Cannibal Holocaust draws. This film is generally regarded as one of the grossest, sickest films ever produced, and I'm hard-pressed to argue. In fact, there was a time when the film earned itself a reputation as a genuine snuff film, which is only true if you count the naimals that were killed to make this movie. As I heard the story, Deodato even had to produce some of the actors before a court to prove they were not dead, and that their onscreen demise, however realistic and horrifying, was in fact nothing more than a very good special effect. Of special note was the woman who performed the now infamous "ass through mouth impaling," but we don't want to ruin things by getting ahead of ourselves.

As the title suggests, the film has something to do with cannibalism. We begin with a Franco Nero looking guy traveling to the Amazon to find out what happen to his film crew pals. The crew had gone into the jungle to make a documentary on cannibals. Common sense would tell me that if my friends go into the jungle to make a film about cannibals, and then we never hear from them again - -well, it just seems like a no-brainer. But this guy must find out for sure. So he bullies some local tribesman into guiding him and his gruff companions into the jungle.

The first tribe they encounter has been ravaged, their village burned, their food ruined. Damn cannibals! But wait -- soon our hero finds out it was not cannibals who did this -- it was the film crew. In their quest to capture the most shocking and grotesque images possible, the crew themselves instigated a massacre. In this revelation lies the enveloping, scathing message of Cannibal Holocaust. The primitives, even the cannibals, commit horrible acts in the name of ritual, in the name of warfare, and in the name of survival. Modern man, however, will initiate a brutal slaughter of innocents simply for the entertainment value of it all.

Eventually, our hero hooks up with the cannibal tribe that lives in the trees in the deep jungle. After gaining their trust, he finds the remains of his friends, and takes their film canisters back for development.

From this point, it becomes a film within a film, as we watch the crew fool around, goof off, and finally set off on their bloody mission. It is through these films that he realizes how horrific modern man can be, as he watches his "friends" butcher the innocent, torture animals, rape young girls, and burn villages to the ground.

Unfortunately for the film crew, after they are finished with the benevolent natives, they stumble acorss some less soft-boiled locals. You find yourself almost rooting for the cannibals as they fight back against the sadistic film crew. Well, you don't actually root, because it's pretty hard to root for rape and castration.

The film definitely walks the thin line between "cautionary tale" and outright exploitation. In many ways, Deodata creates a celluloid paradox, a film that angrily lashes out againts inflicting suffering on others simply to entertain, while at the same time augemnting his special effects with real-life scenes of animal mutilation and murder. Deodata gets tripped up in the seductive power of the one thing he most criticizes in this film.

Nevertheless, it's a powerful, if stomach-turning piece. Deodata parades a seemingly endless procession of horrific images across the screen, from scenes of the camera crew fucking like animals amid the charred remains of the village they torched to the aforementioned "poster" effect, the woman they find impaled with a sharpened stake running through her ass and out her mouth. That's one for the ages, my friends. And there's plenty more where that came from. Even among gorehounds, Cannibal Holocaust is regarded as something that can be difficult to get through.

It's probably because it's very much not your typical splatter film. It has a much more "documentary" feel to it, not entirely unlike another extremely grotesque and controvertial atrocity film, Men Behind the Sun, which also walks (and often stumbles across) the same line between criticism and exploitation of certain events. Deodata's direction departs from drawn-out gore shots and steady close-ups. The camerawork is often shaky and voyeuristic, as if we are hiding in the brush watching the horror unfold. Despite the sometimes outrageous events onscreen, the film maintains a serious and realistic tone.

Unfortunately for the film's rather lauditory message about the savagery of modern man, and how having been so far removed from nature for so long has, in its own way, driven many of us quite mad, the film loses itself in violent excess and can't help but cross over into the realm of exploitation. I'm no discontent of exploitation film-making, but it does seem that Deodata tends to shoot himself in the thematic foot when he can't help but linger over involved turtle skinnings. The film's social commentary would be much easier to accept if he hadn't been so into depicting real scenes of animal cruelty. I mean, if you can fake a castration or gutting of a human as well as Deodata can, surely you can pull off the goring of a fake turtle.

Despite it's flaws, Cannibal Holocaust remains a worthwhile mile marker in the history of cult film. It's not an easy film to recommend, and I know some people actually have a hard time dealing with the fact that they like the movie. I like it, and that doesn't bother me. I recognize some of its innate hypocrisy, but in the end I admire the boldness and ambition of the project far more than I am reviled by its horror. You can probably figure out whether or not you're the type of person who would understand this film, or be outraged by it, who would watch intently or who would be sickened, who would enjoy it (for lack of a better wor) or who would just fall asleep or wonder what's on Must See TV tonight. It's a call you have to make for yourself.