...and I'm including Krakatowa Powers and the Geyserettes (1997) in there. Cannibal Holocaust has always enjoyed that special sort of notoriety that comes from been banned in various "territories" but whereas some movies get the cull for reasons of self-censorship or cultural sensitivity (A Clockwork Orange for example), Holocaust is a thick soup of voyeuristic, demented violence and gore - censored despite the fact that the sort of people who'd want to see it more than once are precisely the type of malforms that will get a copy anyway whereas most others would either chose not to watch it or start to and realise that it's a load of old crap. Indeed its got internal organs galore but curiously no brains. Banning it serves no purpose other than to give it an aura it doesn't deserve. It is, when all the hype is cut away, say like the guts of a giant turtle, a supremely soul-destroying, pointless experience. Artistically worthless. The only reason to watch it at all is to see how much worse it's going to get and I'm not spoiling anything for you by saying that your looking at quite a scale and the journey is long and tough. The story or hook if you like, is that, some movie makers go into the jungle, encounter a tribe of base savages who eat their fellow man and get horribly brutalised, murdered and consumed but luckily for us the whole thing is captured on film. This is pre-Blair Witch stuff with a great deal more calories, conceived by Deodato, the would-be snuff peddler when those directors were chest-lunching. To say that 'ol Holocaust is hard going is just ever so understating the case. Many movies claim to be a difficult watch but in this case the real holocaust might have been a preferable experience. Men and women have equal reason to fear its many stomach churning sequences. For the boys it'll be the scene in which some poor sod has his penis excised from his genital space and eaten while the baying mob disembowel him alive. Girls, sit back and look forward to the woman mounted vaginally on a spear scene and lets not forget the animal snuff. Pigs, monkeys, turtles - you name it they get it. If you've always thought that Babe was missing the scene in which he gets the bullet or that Finding Nemo might have worked better with a display of turtle guts then this is the flick you've been waiting your whole life to see. Scalped monkeys are the perfect antidote to all those cutesy born free type movies we've had to suffer over the years but the directors a brave man because if the A.L.F ever see this he'll need to be checking the underside of his car with a mirror for life. There was a lot of nonsense when this was made about it being snuff and those sensitive Italians didn't like the animal slaughter (this is the nation that invented fascism!) but the authorities may have wondered why you'd release a film that portrayed you murdering your cast (its damning evidence after all) - why not just murder them? In the end the only people who really get slayed are the audience but not in a funny way - if its this or 'While you Were Sleeping' it's still the Bullock movie...but only just of course.
Review of Cannibal Holocaust
