Cannibal Holocaust

It's a Friday night in the 1980's. Disco is dead and lounges are for lizards. You don't want to hit the bars as you're not one of those faggots who think it's always 5 o'Clock somewhere. You know where you need to be? At that run-down cinema down on the far end of town. One of those old grindhouses with soda sticky floors, stale popcorn nobody ever buys, and people fucking in the back row at four in the afternoon. Yeah! That's the place to be! And Cannibal Holocaust is playing as the better half of a double feature. It's a great time to be alive.

And then people started to watch this film and the drama began.

A Summary of the film

This page contains spoilers — important plot secrets and/or conclusions may be revealed. For example,
HOLY SHIT WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE SAVAGES!!!1

The film opens on a beautiful shot of the Amazonian Rainforest. Soothing music plays in the background. We cut to a movie studio in New York City: present day (Ok, present in the '70's, but close enough). A studio exec is talking to his crew. Some young film makers went into "the green inferno" to shoot a documentary but never came back. They are presumed dead. The studio has decided to do a documentary on the film makers and to send someone with huge brass balls to rescue the footage. They find a man with balls the size of the ice berg that sunk the titanic. He agrees to shoot the documentary and find the film.

He starts out easy by asking people around New York City about the people who went missing. They seem like normal enough folks. Feel free to fast forward through this part, even if the dad complaining about his son running around with a camera instead of getting a real job is amusing. With the boring shit out of the way, he heads to the green inferno. He meets up with some Colombians who agree to help him find his way through the jungle. They aren't happy about the documentary people going missing either: they knew the guy who was leading him. He was freaking awesome in the jungle. The Columbians figure the kids did something stupid and the cannibals got them. No stupidity this time: they get a smart mother fucker to lead the party.

The smart mofo goes into the edge of the jungle and catches a tribal kid. They get him stoned and convince him to lead them to his village. On the way they watch this woman smeared with mud get killed via giant stone stake in the vagina. Death by giant sharpened dildo apparently is a jungle punishment for sleeping around. Once they get to the village they give the village the boy acting like they totally rescued him. The Village is pissy because the last white people who visited them were jackasses, but is eventually convinced these guys are cool via the power of drugs and white cock. They get a native guy to lead them deeper in the jungle.

First they find the guide. Yep, he's dead. Then they find two tribes fighting and help chase one of them off. The Colombian sends out a badass kid who impresses the natives by surviving the jungle version of a Mexican Standoff: one dude vs twenty natives with poison darts. It works. The villagers now respect them. These villagers are part of the Tree People, so named because they like to get stoned and live in a giant fucking treehouse. They are led to the Tree People village. The Tree People totally have the film and are using it as a talisman to ward away white people. They try to convince the Tree People it doesn't work (there's a white guy right there! lol!) but it fails. So the white guy records the shaman chanting on a tape recorder and plays it back to them. Convinced that he's a magic man, they give him the film in exchange for the tape recorder. Everyone gets out of the jungle alive.

The ballsy guy gets back to NYC and looks at the film. He tells the studio to cancel the documentary. They don't listen. He lets them see the footage taken so far and they see nothing wrong with it. Then they see what the documentary team shot.

The film starts with some young college guys: Mark and Jack the Cameraguys and Alan the director. They work with Alan's Girlfriend/script girl, Fae. They're horsing around, taking video of the Fae without a shirt, getting drunk- you know, normal college stuff. They go to the green inferno. They act like it's spring break. It's not like they're going into a deadly jungle or anything. They argue with their guide. They don't care what has to die around them and are amused by the death and suffering they find. They run across a woman impaled on a stake and make dick jokes. They watch a woman give birth, then the villagers stone the baby. They make racist jokes. The guide is getting tired of the morons and wants to go back. They go deeper into the jungle even though the guide thinks it's a bad idea. The guide, distracted by the dumbasses, gets bitten by a venomous snake and dies. The dumbasses are now lost in the jungle but still think they're going to be fine because they're white.

They see a villager out looking for food. He doesn't seem dangerous. Jack shoots him in the leg instead of talking to him because all natives are dangerous. He then follows the native back to his village. It's the village where the boy we saw earlier was raised. The poor native guy's leg is infected. He is going to die from that gunshot wound and is in a lot of pain. Alan gets a brilliant idea: he shoots the villagers livestock, then shoves as many villagers as he can into a hut and lights it on fire. Alan makes the guys film it because mass murder is totally rad. He then fucks his girlfriend on the beach while the natives watch their village burn down.

They decide to go deeper into the jungle to find the Tree People. The guys get horny and surprise sex the natives. Fae tries to stop them and gets surprise sex, too. They can't find the Tree People village despite burning and raping their way through the jungle. It's OK, the natives find them instead and hit Jack with a spear. Alan shoots him and they film the cannibals dismembering and eating Jack. Fae is found by the villagers from the village they burned earlier. She is dragged into the mud and raped before being beheaded. Her boyfriend Alan films the whole thing and does nothing to save her. The remaining males are picked off and eaten one by one. The survivors just sit there and film each other being killed and eaten. The final guy takes some selfies of himself being murdered.

The studio execs pause. Maybe they shouldn't release the film? The movie ends with the ballsy guy wondering who the "Real cannibals" are. Hint: it's white people.

Ohmagerd! Ban this Filth!

This is not what we meant by "pole dancing".

This film contains...

People killing real live animals
Dead and dying people
Murder via fire, gunshot, sharpened stone dildo, ect.
lots of body mutilation and cannibalism
People fucking on-camera

Sure, lots of films contain these things, but all of those films look sort of fake. The director wanted things to be as realistic as possible. He wanted the deaths to look real, so he had real animals die onscreen among the human actors. He wanted the sex to be real, but the actor had a girlfriend and didn't want to cheat. He used a dildo positioned near his dick instead. Casts made from real skeletons were draped in meat to make the human bodies being eaten look as realistic as possible. Actual rainforest natives were hired and used as much as possible. If he could find a way to make it look real, the director did it.

Naturally, everyone freaked the fuck out even in the film's native country of Italy. Italy banned the film until 1984 and didn't allow an uncut version to be sold for almost twenty years. Britain wouldn't show Cannibal Holocaust in theatres and banned the on videotape in 1983 declaring it to be one of the "Video nasties". To this day the uncut version still can't be purchased or aired in the UK. Australia, Norway, Finland, New Zealand, the USA and more all banned the film in 1984. Australia and the USA unbanned it in 2005 without edits. We suspect this is because some people now get off on it these says so there is porn much worse than Cannibal Holocaust out there right now. New Zealand, in contrast, pussied out and decided to renew the ban in 2006 and the film is still banned today.

All of the bans is why Cannibal Holocaust is rightfully known as "The Most Controversial Movie Ever Made". But were the bans right? Let's look at the reasons...

Animal Deaths!

Yes, actual animals died in this film. The director said it was OK at the time because they were all fed to the natives who like barbecue as much as anyone else. The animals were all killed instantly or close to it without suffering. After watching his film be banned over and over the director got a massive dose of Troll's Remorse and wished he never had added the scenes. Typically the edited versions remove all the animal deaths because the censors say it's A-OK to kill animals for "art films", but not in "exploitation films" like Cannibal Holocaust.

What died?

At the start of the film a coati is killed and cut open with a knife by the smart mofo leading the ballsy guy who finds the film. The critter's actual stomach (cooked and basted in tomato sauce) is fed to the boy. No word yet on if the cocaine they also gave him was real, but hey- it was shot in South America so anything's possible.

Once the jackasses get into the jungle they kill a large turtle, chop it's limbs and head off, and remove the shell. The excuse is to save rations and because it looks badass on camera. Also it lets the jackasses be stupid while holding a real dead turtle's head. Yay? A squirrel monkey was later killed for the same in-film reason. Oh, and they killed TWO monkeys during filming because the first take didn't come out just right.

One of the idiots doesn't remember to keep their boots stuffed and naturally finds their shoes are full of spiders in the morning. The tarantula that decided a boot was a good place to sleep is cut in half with a machete. The body is then used to tease Fae who scream like a girl because she is one, duh.

Because venomous snakes are freaking dangerous, the director decided that a small boa would be perfect to look scary instead. It's not like people can tell the difference between two snakes covered with mud or anything. The boa was framed for biting the guide, then killed with a machete.

While the jerkasses were rampaging in the villages they kicked then shot a pig. That pig was not a prop. It did make delicious bacon, though.

In short the film was frequently banned because it depicted people killing animals for self protection (in the film, anyway) or food (the real reason they died). How shocking.

Cannibalism!

Remember the part where people were supposed to be eating each other? Well, as it turns out the tribes in the film are all actual tribes that existed in the 1970's in the rainforest. They just were dramatized a little. By a little we mean "they made shit up and used unrelated tribes to pretend they were these actual tribes". Naturally people got offended that the peaceful, noble natives of the jungle were being exploited by a film that turns them into savage cannibals and started saying the film was racist! The real irony is that if any of these people had actually watched the film it shows that the natives were just doing what any normal people would do to survive. It's the white people who were assholes which is actually racist against white film makers and not the native tribes.

Of course there also is the fact that by 70's standards the special effects were hyper realistic. I mean, they literally used casts from actual skeletons and draped them with rare steak and barbecued pork to get that "munching on a human" effect. This led to wild allegations that actual people were being eaten. The debate on this can be summed up in two words: lol, no.

It's a Snuff Film!

describe how it started snuff film genre basically etc

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Cannibal Holocaust

Contents

A Summary of the film