Cannibal Holocaust

This ninety minute showcase of brutality outwardly tries to give the viewer the impression that it carries a message. In fact, this pious message – to highlight the dark side of man and the shameful commercialisation of violence – is just a mere excuse for Deodato to show us the harshest snuff ever committed against animals in a feature film (turtle lovers, don't watch this) and to portray in an extremely authentic way the filth (there's no other way to put it) that man can commit against man. The level of authenticity is so great that while watching it, I wondered if it was really just staged (but not with the animals, they're really live murders). Overall summary: a very artfully made disgusting film that pretends to be profound, but I don't buy it. (09/25/2003)

Well, what can I say… Unrealistic as a documentary, weak as horror, above average as a film, very successful as a controversial piece. Now it all depends on what you expect from Cannibal Holocaust. I wanted controversial horror and hence my rating: I was very surprised, but little scared → three stars. (06/11/2008)

A spectacular performance, taken to an almost unintentional high with its missing actors and a ban in sixty countries. Yet we don't see anything particularly brutal in the film (though of course a phallocentric society is less accepting of a white man's penis getting lopped off onscreen than with a cool sexy native impaled on a pole), so all the suggestiveness is created by the then atypical approach of literal found footage, in which we don't see much of the final massacre, but in uncomfortably long and obscured shots we catch elements of the dismemberment of a crew of demented men whose previous motivations are strangely nonsensical yet horrifying. The overreach of this approach is demonstrated by Deodato about halfway through the film, in which he projects us actual footage of executions somewhere in Africa while convincing us that these are staged situations, as well as poking at a few real animals, among other things, and wrapping the whole thing in a classic detective format and all the devices that characterize it. It's a great pity that the package comes complete with a slice of classic Italian filmmaking and the terrible acting and cannibalistic music that seem to have blundered in from some furry porn, but again, you can comfort yourself with the fact that you’re not watching some highbrow intellectualism but a no-holds-barred excursion into the world of cinematic freedom. (12/29/2015)

It’s not easy to rate this film. Does good porn deserve some stars just for giving me an erection? Should I consider it a good thing that a film insidiously pressed the buttons of my innermost and most intimate visceral instincts, making me feel loathsome and guilty (guilty for voluntarily, voyeuristically watching the most disgusting thing under the sun)? The last shot of the film evokes the feeling that the director truly achieved his objective and won. If that’s the case, then Cannibal Holocaust deserves not three stars, but five. But that is VERY questionable and I would rather not rate this film at all. Because if that is not the case, they should burn every last copy of it. (07/16/2002)

I wonder who the real cannibals are... A combination of cinema verité and film à thèse. Heart of Darkness transferred into (post) modernity, a film that, with its limited possibilities, constantly tries to reflect on itself (the documentary is actually a transfer of the principle of film itself into the fictional world) and raises the question of instinct / violence / civilization mechanisms that supposedly keep us away from our primitive nature, but in fact they are constantly subject to it (often in the name of nobility). It's not deeply academic - rather clearly schematic - and in places it is not filmed very deftly, but it just makes sense and it has a message - if we can abstract from the outrage that someone has the audacity to kill a pig or a turtle in the name of the film, we will soon find out that film consciously deals with this "just outrage". More precisely, what hides behind it. (04/04/2013)