Cannibal Holocaust

Cannibal Holocaust

Does it seem like the Sewer is always down on cannibal films? If they don’t totally suck, then they’re completely vile, or both. And yet, we both keep coming back to them, don’t we? Anyway, it’s Halloween time around the ol’ Sewer, and if we’re not watching a slasher film, it’s because we’re watching what keeps us coming back; special edition DVDs of reprehensible crap like Cannibal Holocaust.

EC entertainment brings home the groceries with its uncut remastered anamorphic widescreen deluxe collector’s edition of some form of sick delight that hasn’t diminished in transgressive power since 1979.

The legendary Holocaust seems to prefigure the Blair Witch and other ‘reality found footage’ horror films with its tale of explorers who “go missing” on a cannibal hunting expedition. The first half of the film concerns an anthropologist who steers through some extreme cannibal trouble himself, only to find several tins of film belonging to the unlucky explorers.

The second half of the film details a few jaded TV executives trying to figure out how to further their lame careers while gagging through the footage that they wish to turn into a documentary series. This despite the fact that the unlucky crew of explorers quite adequately expose themselves in this footage as psychopathic, genocidal rapists and murderers before being hacked apart by stone axes.

Clearly it would be TV ahead of its time.

Really just a freak-show series of ever more despicable events, Cannibal Holocaust nonetheless packs quite a bit of revolting power. Could it be the acts of genuine animal slaughter and mutilation (most of which are performed by the protagonists, making Cannibal Ferox seem tame in comparison )? Could it be the horrible air of mysogyny and deadly rape? Or could it be because of what I like to call an awful lot of offal?

Whatever the case, Cannibal Holocaust will leave you feeling sick and stunned. At the end the one half-way decent character muses: I wonder who the real cannibals are? It was probably a case of bad dubbing: obviously the real cannibals are the ones that eat people, but what he meant was: I wonder who the real savages are? The ones who made this unreviled slime, or the ones who paid to watch it?

Booahhahahaahahaa!