Rish's Reviews
Pre-movie thoughts: I'm something of a sick human being, ask anyone. I read in a magazine once about a baby that was born without eyelids, and a friend of mine, Rob Caldwell, told me he was born with no urethra, and here's a confession for you: I have no conscience. I wasn't born without one, but I've recently managed to have it removed by an uncertified doctor in a back alley clinic. But even with no conscience, I am worried about seeing Cannibal Holocaust. I don't like sick, uber-realistic, non-narrative splatter films. The ones that are documentary-like bother me. Heck, even Texas Chainsaw bothered me. So, when a coworker slipped me his copy of Holocaust, I was tempted not to watch it. I doubt I'll get pleasure from a movie so graphically realistic that the director had to go to court to prove he didn't actually butcher his actors.
But I spoke to tyranist, who told me to go ahead and watch it . . . and I did.
Post-movie thoughts: Surprise, surprise. I saw this in conjunction with Michele Soavi's The Church, and surprisingly, I liked this much more than that. The story was just really, really good, with a lot of cool nature, a lot of not-so-cool nature, and a treatise on humanity and savagery. Still, I'm glad I didn't see it in my younger years . . . I might have believed it was all real. Or had I seen it during the brief time when I tried to develop a conscience, it might have really bothered me.
In a storyline that may seem a liiiittle bit familiar, Cannibal Holocaust deals with a documentary team that delves into the mysterious Amazon to shoot footage of South American natives and prove that cannibalism continues in this day and age. They are never seen again. Not long after, a second group heads down there to uncover what happened to them, and they find the film the first team shot. They meet the friendly and the not-so-friendly natives, see a lot of neat wildlife, and make it back to the U.S. to screen the footage. Needless to say, there really were cannibals down there.
Besides The Exorcist, this is the most infamous horror film of them all (will you back me up on this, editor?). And what pushes this over the edge is the fact that it seems so real In The Exorcist, you know it's a movie, even if the subject matter gets to you. This film presents itself in such a way that you can't dismiss immediately it as fiction. The locale is certainly compelling, there's real natives, authentic-sounding Spanish dialogue, and a whole lot of nudity. One character's death is so realistic, I did wonder.
The film is also infamous for the fact that they filmed the natives (and characters) killing animals (most disgustingly, a turtle). It's really gross stuff. In fact, the animal killing is so graphic that the human killing looks phony by comparison. On the negative side, there was some really bad, really Seventies music ("Ohhh, it's so wonderful!"), and the film leaves a bad taste in your mouth that can't easily be faked. It's graphic and parts seem amateurish--but its presentation is much better than Blair Witch, which got (or must have gotten) some of its inspiration from this. The shaky camerawork is distracting, but it helps hide the tricks and effects. If they ARE effects . . .
I noticed from my notes that in an almost cute way, the shocks of this film can be summed up in the word "Carried" (Or "I Red Car," I guess):
Castration.
Amputation.
Rape.
Real animal mutilations.
Impaling.
Eviceration.
Disembowlement.
The movie is revolting, unsettling, gritty, and stark, but I found it to be a pretty good film. And part of its power is that many times, it simply rolls tape and simply shows the horrors, without cutting away. You can't help but feel that you're watching things really happen, playing themselves out in front of you. It's YOU, in this case, who looks away.
Line To Remember: "I wonder who the real cannibals are."
I'd Recommend It To: Real hard-core Horror afficionados, specifically people who think they can handle it and who would also be interested in this sort of thing.