petak, 29. ožujka 2013.

Ruggero Deodato - Cannibal Holocaust (1980)




Film je bio toliko skandalozan da ga je donedavno bilo gotovo nemoguće naći pa je izazvao religijsko obožavanje, no danas ga možete gledati na YouTubeu kao da je sve u njemu pisofkejk.



DISLIKE IT ALL YOU WANT, ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ MIGHT BE SOME SORT OF MASTERPIECE?

by Marc Brousseau
Recently scratched this one off my ‘MUST-SEE’ list!
When I sat down in a crowded theater,  earlier this evening, to finally watch ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST,’ I thought to myself, “Okay, you’ve heard so much about this over the years… Within the next two hours, you will likely see things that you find offensive, but you will also think it’s stupid, and simply cross it off your never ending MUST-SEE list.”
Let me begin this review by saying, I don’t think I ever, ever, ever, ever…ever want to see this film again. I may need to, so I can properly process my guilt for having watched it, in the first place. I dunno. Can a movie give you P.T.S.D.?
Okay. I wouldn’t say it got to me that much, but if I’m ever asked to name a film that could inflict that kind of trauma on a viewer, I might offer ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ as my best guess. Such an experience is exactly the point of this deliriously-warped, seriously disturbing commentary on sensationalized documentaries/images, within a film, within a documentary, within a film, within a theater, staring back at a theater – I know, I know, it’s like waaay post modern – if all that, wasn’t part of some larger, sweeping concept, I might have to say this was just unwatchable, exploitative and bad.
But after careful deliberation, I have to admit, it’s just not. It’s difficult to watch and very exploitative but it’s a great movie. Granted, this isn’t saying much, but it is certainly the best “FOUND FOOTAGE” Horror-film I’ve ever seen.
This film will eventually redeem itself.
I was absolutely wrong when I sat down to watch this. Sure, it may be the feel bad movie of its century, and it is certainly exploitative, but there’s also all this genuinely thought-provoking aforementioned Post-Modern meta-shit-mayhem going’s on. It’s just wrapped up in exploitation packaging. The exploitation angle is a legitimate plot-device, an argument that exploitation can serve a purpose. Without ‘HOLOCAUST’S’ exploitative content, it’s central criticism of sensationalized violence doesn’t work- not this effectively. ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ is underlying hypocritical, and it employs this hypocrisy to challenge it’s own hypocrisy. Its a film that slays the Sea Turtle because it has an audience and because the audience paid to say so.
While there is certainly room for interpretation, these layers are not handled lightly. You will not see ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ and wonder if all these concerns occurred to it’s makers. Those viewers who don’t understand the film’s self-criticism, might find themselves lost, but that the film’s writers were keenly aware of their intentions, isn’t exactly subtle. ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ may as well have concluded its third act by cutting to a character typing these words for me! That wouldn’t be too far off from what actually happens in it’s script. Which seems to have been born of this central concept. However, pretentious or indecipherable this may be to it’s target audience. Target, being the key word.
But there are those viewers, like myself, who can wrap their heads around it – noxious as that may be. It’s a not a horror-film masquerading as art, and its not an art house horror film. What it is, however, is a legitimate art-house film, disguised as an exploitation-horror flick. What’s more? Any misunderstanding of it’s meta-weirdness, be it by fans of exploitation and/or horror, only further solidifies it’s central concept. This is a film that wants to be misunderstood, by obnoxious torture-porn dick-wads. To label it a ‘Gore-film’ for instance, would   be about as correct as calling ‘Rambo’ a ‘War-film.’
I myself, am a big fan of exploitation and horror films, but for their style and popcorn-cinema nature (Try and eat popcorn watching this film – I dare ya!). But it has seriously impressed me, that every time someone has suggested that I watch ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ over the years – because ‘It’s so sick braugh,’ – those people, they were part of the film’s plan. They just didn’t know it. Marilyn Manson must have taken a cue from this, with all his mid-90s media-twisting concept albums. Thankfully, this ‘using-your-fans-against-themselves’ concept hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. Miraculously, I don’t seem to be the only reviewer, acknowledging ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’S’ merits. I hope I never have to watch this piece of shit again. It’s that good.
Much more than “The most controversial film ever made” – it’s a sensation!
But I feel it would be unfair to leave it at that. Because, when I say that I never, ever (x5) want to see ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ again, it’s NOT, as you might expect from what I’ve written so far, just because it’s so upsetting. It’s even more-so because it is one of the most powerful, and uncompromisingly dense films, I have ever seen. After seeing it once, even it’s marketing leaves a lump in my throat. The tag-line on the cover of the DVD reads “The Most Controversial Movie Ever Made.” This takes on a whole meaning after seeing the film.
By making this third-parties, blurb, a sensationalized  commentary on the material, it succeeds in enveloping itself within it’s criticism. ‘HOLOCAUST’ is very interested in challenging the idea of sensationalizing the darkest violent acts of mankind. So perhaps, it’s current distributors at ‘GRINDHOUSE RELEASING’ are unaware that in trying to sensationalize ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ they have made the film, it’s own target. Aware or not, make no mistake, this is exactly how ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ earns it’s status, as the ‘MOST CONTROVERSIAL MOVIE EVER MADE!” It’s attack on sensationalized violence makes Michael Haneke’s films look like a toy poodle. Sensationalized violence is precisely what the filmmakers are targeting here, and it is harsh criticism that literally commits murder to challenge it’s entertainment value. Damn you if you’re entertained.
I wonder if the filmmaker’s feel bad for having made it?
When the violence starts, it’s alarmingly perverse. Almost silly.
“This is so deliberately obscene.” I thought. Where in the world is this going?” “It must have something in mind, but what?”
The on-screen butchering, in ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST,’ is a mixture of actual violence toward animals, and over-the-top obscene, fake violence, inflicted upon it’s characters, by caricatures. As those caricatures, beckon upon the protagonists, eventually, if you made it that far, the blood feels as if it were only your hands.
For something so disgraceful, it’s undeniably smart. As it neared the second and third act, I actually had to try and dislike ‘HOLOCAUST’ because the content was so angering. You could feel it in the air in the room. The entire theater squirmed in their seats. But all I ended up with, in the end, was one big, morally-reprehensible, and surprisingly challenging, question mark. And while a question mark doesn’t necessarily equate to a diamond, it is unavoidable, that Ruggero Deodato’s ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST,’ is profoundly focused on asking questions, while it disturbs and threatens. It’s revolting in a very real, visceral way, but it’s so damn effective, well made, and self aware, that you just can’t look away. You may dislike this movie-going experience more than any you ever sit through, but you will never forget it. Unless, of course, you physically have-to look away, or leave first, and honestly, you might want to. Really.
I should say that I was very surprised to find that almost an entire theater full of a varied, 18-65 demographic, sat with it throughout the length of the entire film. I can only imagine that they also could’t look away, unless they physically had to, and some did…but I found it very hard to believe that no one seemed to walk out.
For all of ‘HOLOCAUST’s’ offenses, and its cruelty to animals, it is almost too relevant and damning of the larger state of humanity to be unwarranted. Even though the film is 33 years old.
It would be lazy to just dismiss it as mean-spirited, exploitative, fucked-up, and unnecessarily arduous, because… well, that’s exactly what it is and that’s what it aims to be. But, just when your body instinctively tells you to do so, it also becomes quite obvious that the film has a special message to send, again and again. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I find, in it, to consider. Then, likewise, just when you think that the message was made more-than-apparent, two or three on-screen turtle slaughterings, and peer-performed rape-abortion-murders ago, you realize the film, had an even higher purpose; a methodical gut-wrenching (literally) political agenda.
Have you ever seen a movie that manages to actually justify the onscreen sacrifice of defenseless animals, while simultaneously making you, not despise its filmmakers, for actually doing it on-camera, but instead, hate the world because they actually have a point? Is ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ actually managing to do this? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just fooling me into thinking it’s justifying it…wait. That might be the point. Wait, that IS the point. Grrrrrr... So then you’re thinking,”Okay, I get it!” “Enough!,” and just then, it cuts to someone staring back at you, watching the film, making the exact same complaint.
After viewing ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST”, when I slapped my pit bull on the nose, for not letting go of my shirt, I felt like a monster. 15 minutes later, I found myself walking the same dog, questioning whether or not blood sacrifice could really serve some higher purpose, after all. I wish I was kidding…
And maybe I still haven’t made up my mind. Not that I’d ever do that (certainly never to a dog),..


This kind of severity and meta-weirdness is what you are in for, all around, with ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.’ It is a uniquely powerful, exploitative, philosophical and upsetting film. Politically charged and gut-wrenching, both literal and figuratively.
Given some of it’s deeper meaning, I don’t know that anyone could really say they, LIKE-it. At least, not in any way more-than just admiring it’s virtues. Anyone who really latches onto all of its multi-dimensional meaning could really do no better than sigh and stare at their shoes for a while.
Unless they are a sociopath. Do those people really like anything? I don’t pretend to know.
Hey! Did I just say ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ has virtue? That, I did!
In case, I haven’t made this clear enough, this is NOT a feel-good movie. I certainly cannot ever see myself exclaiming ‘I loved CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, you guys!‘ and I would advise you to steer clear of anyone who ever says that to you. One only likes ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST’ the way one likes Grandma’s suffering to end. Still, I suppose for some, it might be rewarding in a way. Possibly in that way that watching brain surgery, is educational? And that’s good! Isn’t it?
Sigh.
Listen, it’s an absolutely awful movie-going experience, but it’s undeniably well-made and unforgettable. It may actually be some sort of masterpiece, but uh…it’s just got to be wrong to say that about ‘CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.’ It’s got to be, but I just did.
 

Over a decade ago or so, I began my search for a certain infamous Italian cannibal film that I was led to believe was the Holy Grail of horror and splatter cinema and considering the film was never released in the USA in any home format (as it is today), not to mention the fact that it was not exactly as easy as it is today to find such rare films online, it felt like a rather hopeless situation in terms of seeing the film, so I inevitably caved and swallowed my pride, went to a horrific horror convention flooded with flabby fanboys who masturbate to Friday the 13th Part III (1982) while wearing Wal-Mart hockey masks, and did the unthinkable by buying a bootleg copy of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) directed by Ruggero Deodato (Waves of Lust, The House on the Edge of the Park) from a superlatively slimy and sleazy bootlegger from NYC. While the act of paying a parasitical urban pirate money for a film he had no part in creating disgusted me just as if I bought crack from some jaded jigaboo, I had no idea that the less than pristine print of Cannibal Holocaust was going to shock me in such a severe manner that I realized that my lifetime of being desensitized due to my horror movie addiction was not nearly as bad as I had originally assumed, thus leading me to similarly ‘infamous’ cinematic works like Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1976), Roger Watkins’ Last House on Dead End Street (1977), Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983), Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987), Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), and countless other conspicuously controversial cinematic works that have made it all but impossible for me to take any Hollywood film seriously in terms of ‘taking risks’ and shocking the viewer. While Italian cannibal films are not exactly my favorite film subgenre, I still regard Cannibal Holocaust as king and can honestly say it is the only guido flesh-eater flick that I have taken the trouble to view more than once. In fact, after nearly half a decade without seeing it, I decided to re-watch Cannibal Holocaust recently and once again realized why it is the only "found footage" film I can stomach, as well as one of the only films that I am not surprised was banned not only in its native country of Italy, but also a number of other countries and why it still remains banned today in some places as one of the only exploitation films that brings minor poetry to senseless animal slaughter. 



 A surprisingly seamless yet savage film-within-a-film, Cannibal Holocaust has been described as a potent piece of cinematic social commentary, as well as repugnant, reprehensible, and racist film with no redeeming qualities. Frankly, I couldn't care less if some sissy ethno-masochistic xenophile that lurks in an overpriced independent coffee shop is even vaguely correct in his assessment of the film, but it is a fact that director Ruggero Deodato has cited the less than politically correct Italian documentary filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco Prosperi of Mondo cane (1962) fame as a major influence behind the film. Like Jacopetti, Cavara, and Prosperi’s documentaries, Cannibal Holocaust does not wallow in cuckold ‘cultural sensitivity’ as it portrays “noble savages” (the Yanomamo and Shamatari tribesmen featured in the film are authentic, but only the Yanomamo partake in a form of post-mortem ritual cannibalism) in a uniquely unflattering light, even if the film has an absurd tacked-on message, "I wonder who the real cannibals are?," in a feeble and superficial attempt to condemn imperialism and whatnot. What is more important is that Spaghetti Western maestro Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America) wrote a letter to director Deodato after watching Cannibal Holocaust, which stated, “Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.” And, indeed, the film caused all kinds of hell around the world, hence its relative scarcity until rather recently. Featuring a pseudo-documentary entitled “The Last Road to Hell” (which features real murder scenarios from around the glorious Third World) within the film in the tradition of Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio (1966) and Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971), as well as film reels of a film crew's ill-fated attempt to create a documentary about Amazon Rainforest tribes while raping, pillaging, and terrorizing people, Cannibal Holocaust is more than ample proof that the Occident, as well as the rest of the world (whether they like it or not), has reached an apocalyptic stage since the less ominous days of Italian Neorealism. If you’re a braindead gorehound and want to learn about the innate culture-distorting ills of multiculturalism without having to read a single line from a banal book written by some poof of a pencil-pusher, Cannibal Holocaust is probably the film for you. 


 During the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust, one learns about a missing American film crew comprised of director Alan Yates, his girlfriend Faye Daniels, and two cameramen Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso who traveled to the Amazon to make a documentary about warring indigenous cannibal tribes. A bleeding heart liberal cultural anthropologist named Harold Monroe (played by Jewish-American pornstar Robert Kerman aka R. Bolla of Debbie Does Dallas (1978)) from NYU ends up leading a rescue team to find the forsaken filmmakers. When he arrives in the Amazon, Mr. Monroe hooks up with a guide named Chaco, a charismatic barbarian of a man who snorts cocaine off a knife, and his twinkish assistant Miguel. With the help of a coke-snorting Yacumo tribesman who was taken hostage by the military, the group delves deep inside the rainforest where no other white men would dare to tread, killing real animals on the way and witnessing tribesmen performing adultery punishment against whorish wives, which involves rock-cock dildos being rammed up the philandering women's vaginas. Eventually Monroe and his motley crew locates the warring Ya̧nomamö and Shamatari tribes. After saving the lives of some of the more yellow-bellied Ya̧nomamö, Monroe and his crew are invited back to the tribe’s tree village, but not without suspicion of their weird white man ways, and after having a naked swim with some of the penis-prodding tribeswomen, the anthropologist is taken to a spiritual shrine used to ward off evil Europid spirits where the bones of the missing American filmmakers are located. Naturally, pissed off that those disenfranchised Indians dare to eat cultivated gringos, Monroe freaks out and has a hysterical hissy fit and fires off a couple rounds from his gun, but things cool down when the anthropologist trades a magical tape recorder to the savages for the fallen film crew’s film reels and the two groups celebrate by dining on fresh human meat. Of course, Monroe proves his cultivated open-mindedness and dedication to diversity by chowing down on the remains of savage, if not rather reluctantly so. 


 When Monroe returns back to his inhospitable cosmopolitan habitat of NYC, he is offered by a team of sleazy and shallow executives at the generically named “Pan American Broadcast Company” to host a show of a broadcasted documentary that is being made from the footage he recovered tentatively entitled, “The Green Inferno.” Monroe is shown one of director Alan Yates' previous documentaries, The Last Road to Hell, which features footage of exterminated Africans and piles of corpses of color. The anthropologist also learns that Yates was known to stage some of the footage to make it more enthralling and soon Monroe is exposed to how far the fiendish filmmaker was willing to go to get the perfect wide-angle rape shot and stunning savage-on-savage slaughter. Quite reluctantly, Monroe reviews the ‘found-footage’ that he is supposed to host and learns a number of unflattering things about his foredoomed filmmaker friends, including their taste for butchering and eating giant turtles, burning down entire villages of tribesmen and then forcing them to watch how white folks from America have sex, savagely defiling a savage woman via gringo gang-rape and subsequently impaling her body and blaming it on the savages as a sick sex ritual, blowing away tribesmen with their ‘boomsticks,’ and a variety of other odious displays of behavior that gets Alan Yates and his film crew brutally butchered and eaten by armies of the Ya̧nomamö. Disgusted with himself for being an American white man like Mr. Alan Yates, Monroe leaves the final screening disillusioned, but at least the TV executives decide to destroy the footage. 


 Not unsurprisingly, Cannibal Holocaust was confiscated by authorities a mere ten days after its premiere in Milan, Italy, but director Ruggero Deodato had bigger problems as he was not only charged with obscenity, but also murder as the courts believed the simulated death scenes in the film were real and that the actors that played Alan Yates and his compatriots really met true death, which is the sort of audacious auteur infamy that few other filmmakers can boast. As for Cannibal Holocaust star Robert Kerman, he had the following to say about his experience with mad maestro Ruggero Deodato, stating he is, “A maniac – totally nuts! He was often stressed and he lost his control sometimes and would shout. That really pissed me off. I always had the feeling that Deodato drove everybody crazy. And those animal scenes! I thought those pictures were created by special effects men, but no way was it…I told Deodato I would curse him if he kept on filming those animal mutilation scenes…Those scenes are disgusting and perverted.” Of course, one has to be doing something right when they have the propensity to piss-off and gross-out a Hebraic hardcore pornstar who once admitted, “I hope that porn is the most unrighteous thing I do. If we go out of our way to be scumbags, that's the sin; when I do porn, I offend Shakespeare more than God.” The great irony of Cannibal Holocaust is that despite being considered one of the most decidedly disturbing, exceedingly exploitative, and ceaselessly shocking films ever made, it also happens to be quite breathtaking and even majestic in parts, which is only all the more accentuated by Riz Ortolani’s melodious and highly memorable musical score. While not a work of ‘art cinema’ itself, Cannibal Holocaust is a singular exploitation piece in that it transcends the celluloid ghetto it ostensibly belongs to as a work that proves that films featuring naked brigades of savages castrating and cannibalizing evil white men and primitive women being impaled on poles can be not only aesthetically and thematically redeeming, but also endlessly enthralling. Also, clearly a relentless misanthropic, director Deodato does not care about sparing your emotions and if you came to Cannibal Holocaust hoping to get your jollies off by seeing hordes of denuded exotic primitives being wild and wanton and Amazonian miscegenation between savages and the racially sacrilegious, you’re in for a rude awakening! 



 Predating The Blair Witch Project (1999) – one of the most critically and especially commercially successful independent films ever made (grossing over US$248 million worldwide) – by nearly two decades yet taking the whole “found footage” gimmick to a much deeper and more depraved level, Cannibal Holocaust, despite its lack of availability until relatively recently (Grindhouse Releasing released a great DVD of the film in 2005 in the U.S.), has managed to develop an almost religious cult following over the decades that proves the particularly perverse potency of the film. With proponents like Troma Führer Lloyd Kaufman of all people, who compared the animal slaughtering scenes in the film to Bolshevik auteur Vsevolod Pudovkin's theory of montage, writing, “In Cannibal Holocaust, we see the actors kill and rip apart a giant sea turtle and other animals. The brain has been conditioned to accept that which it's now seeing as real. This mixture of real and staged violence, combined with the handheld camerawork and the rough, unedited quality of the second half of the movie, is certainly enough to convince someone that what they are watching is real,” Cannibal Holocaust proved horror films can be made that truly horrify the viewer to the point of shock and bring one to actually reexamine their entire Weltanschauung on a worldly cross-cultural scale, thus actually making them use their gray matter for once, which is truly an achievement for a genre in which its entire basis lay in striking the nerve of man’s most archaic emotions. A film that demystifies the power of news media and supposedly authentic documentary films, Cannibal Holocaust, to reference The Wizard of Oz (1939), figuratively reveals the “man behind the curtain,” puts him on trial, and has him executed by a savage swarm of sanguinary mud people who may have a virtual incapacity for reason, but who know when someone is truly deserving of death, which is indubitably one of the few truly 'universal' laws of humanity. An incendiary indictment of both degenerate Westerners of the pathologically materialistic persuasion and naive cultural anthropologists of the commie Boasian blend who believe in hocus pocus like “cultural relativism” but are shell-shocked when actually experiencing primitive peoples first hand, Cannibal Holocaust is easily the foremost anti-globalization horror work ever made and an inexplicably anti-agitprop agitprop work that intensely illustrates, quite ironically, via a pseudo-ethnology cinéma vérité work in the vein of French leftist anthropologist/filmmaker Jean Rouch – a xenophiliac man whose supposedly sympathetic documentary depictions of peoples of the dark continent was oftentimes viewed by native filmmakers as having “distorted African realities” – that different races and cultures have an innate incapacity for living in harmony together and that the more the peoples of the world come together, the more barbaric murder the planet will experience on a mayhem-ridden multicultural scale. However, more than anything, Ruggero Deodato has managed to package more practical anthropological insights and lessons in the subjectivity of documentary film/electronic media than one would probably receive at the undergraduate level at an American liberal arts university and if anyone can reach the deluded and damaged minds of fierce philistine gorehounds, they must be a savage genius of the Svengali Italian Stallion sort. - Soiled Sinema


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