Shock Totem 5 by K. Allen Wood

Author:K. Allen Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Shock Totem Publications
Published: 2012-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

–Ryan Bridger

Cannibal Holocaust: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, by Rugerro Deodato (director) and Gianfranco Clerici (writer); starring Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, and Perry Pirkanen; 1980; Unrated; 95 min.

Found-footage movies are all the rage right now, especially in the horror world. And small wonder, too, with reality TV showing us the “real life” of celebrities and other assorted freaks, the sheeple are clamoring for something real, even though very little of what is passed off as reality programming really is. Some love them, some hate them, but there's no denying that when they are done right, they can offer the suspension of disbelief better than any other genre.

The Blair Witch Project kicked off the current craze, but it was far from the first movie to milk the idea. The now lost 1930 exploitation film Ingagi is generally considered to be the first of its kind, and movies which present film that is supposed to show actual events have appeared sporadically before Blair Witch.

One of the most effective is the 1980 Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust.

The movie starts out with the familiar “based on actual events” trope and warns the viewers that what we are about to see will be shocking. It's a promise that director Ruggero Deodato delivers on, where so many others have failed.

The movie starts out in New York City, following Harold Monroe, an anthropologist out to rescue a group of young filmmakers who traveled to the Amazon rainforest to try to document cannibalistic practices among the indigenous peoples. He finds the filmmakers’ remains along with canisters containing the film that they shot, and returns to assemble a documentary based around their footage.

The first half of the movie is a bit slow, but once we get to the showing of the “lost” footage, things get pretty intense. This is not one for the squeamish, as it shows the real deaths of a number of animals (the DVD allows you to skip those if you prefer) and the staged violence is no less effective. I've seen a number of horrific filmed images, and I was cringing quite a bit.

Deodato makes good use of the now familiar shaky-cam technique to show us glimpses of the on screen deaths and enhance the sense of realism, but he does not abuse the technique to the point of weariness, as so many who followed him did.

He was also a marketing visionary. Deodato hired unknown Italian and American actors and stipulated in their contracts that they not appear in any other media for a year to enhance the illusion that the deaths shown in Cannibal Holocaust were genuine.

The ruse was so successful that the film was confiscated ten days after it premiered in Milan, Italy, and he was arrested and charged with obscenity and murder. Deodata was forced to void the contacts and produce his actors in order to avoid life in prison. Now that's some good special effects.

The bonus disc has scads of extras and interviews, including one of the stars that is quite critical of the film and repudiates his involvement in it.

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