A documentary crew go missing in the Amazon and an anthropology professor decides to embark on a mission to find out what has happened to them. In the jungle, he is confronted with hostile natives but he manages to gain their trust and retrieve several film reels - which is all that is left of the crew. The professor takes them back to NYC and watches the screen in horror. The crew behaved abominably towards the natives - torching their huts and raping a young girl. They were also gruesomely cruel towards animals and captured a lot of inter-native violence such as a forced abortion and a woman killed with a giant stone dildo. The best bit of the film is when Alan is leering at a native woman who has been impaled on a pole entering her vagina and exiting her mouth. He has a really sleazy grin on his face until someone says "Watch it Alan, we are filming". He instantly rearranges his features to look shocked and appalled. This hypocrisy is endemic to the Mondo movie genre that director Ruggero Deodato is satirising in Cannibal Holocaust. How far will Mondo movie makers go to get good footage? Are Mondo movies exploiting the Third World for fun? Deodato even includes Mondo footage in Cannibal Holocaust as part of a previous documentary the crew made, complete with allegations of staged deaths (comparable to the accusations levelled at Jacopetti and Prosperi in their epic, but virtually unwatchable Africa Addio). Cannibal Holocaust has been mistaken for a snuff movie for decades. In reality, it is a brilliantly constructed film which truly puts the 'nasty' in Video Nasty.
My first film watched was Carrie aged 2 on my dad's knee. Educated at The University of St Andrews and Trinity College Dublin. Fan of Arthouse, Exploitation, Horror, Euro Trash, Giallo, New French Extremism. Weaned at the bosom of a Russ Meyer starlet. The bleaker, artier or sleazier the better!
