Cannibal Holocaust

The first half an hour was very uninteresting and boring, but after that the film was solid! Very bold and strong for its time. The shots of the turtle guts were the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. For me it's above average found footage, but it’s a very controversial film and I don't recommend it to everyone. 70%. (04/01/2014)

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. (29/12/2015)

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)

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. (11/06/2008)

A (non)movie that is the embodiment of the term “controversial". Cannibal Holocaust is a hard movie to rate. It has no story, no actors either and the only thing that Cannibal Holocaust stands on is its “behind the scenes legend" about how (un)realistic the scenes are. It achieves its aim - to disgust - indisputably excellently, but at the same time it is a boring hundred minutes of tasteless masturbation about nothing. But still you learn something from it. Perhaps that nobody has the right to kill live animals for any kind of movie. But what if that wasn’t the point after all? You don’t know? Well nor do I. Perhaps you will uncover that proclaimed supposed philosophical side of it. Or perhaps not. (26/07/2007)