The Big Payback, Part 1

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Touristas(2006)
Speaking of the colonialist fears conjured up by a film like Zombi 2, talk turns naturally to the frontrunner in the competition for the most violent genre ever: cannibal films. Cannibal films enjoyed their greatest popularity in Italy (and the grindhouse theaters of the U. S.) during the 1970s and early 1980s; these films are unified by a number of thematic and visual characteristics, namely extreme gore, jungle locations, vaguely anti-colonial sentiments, and the real-life killing of animals. Unfortunately, another thing that ties them together is that they’re sadistic bullshit, and racist to boot. Condemnations of both the “civilized” and “primitive” worlds, these films share the nihilistic opinion of Lucio Fulci that human beings are animals at best, nauseating bags of guts at worst. But unlike Italian zombie movies, cannibal films do not trade in metaphors. They are not monsters munching on entrails, but people, and with that extra layer of artifice goes all the fun of a splatter film. What’s left is the discomforting feeling that something must be wrong with you for willingly watching such a display.

Of course, not everyone gets an icky feeling watching cannibal films. After attending the premiere of Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust, Sergio Leone wrote a glowing letter to Deodato, proclaiming “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.” Cannibal Holocaust is considered by connoisseurs of gore to be the finest of the so-called “cannibal cycle,” the Citizen Kane of disembowelment, if you will. The thing that sets it apart from most exploitation cinema is the conceit that some of the footage is documentary. Watching Cannibal Holocaust now, when faux cinema verite style is used for television commercials, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could be fooled by this. One huge plot hole is the lack of explanation as to why a film crew, going deep into the jungle with a limited amount of film stock, chose to waste valuable footage on things like the main female character getting out of the shower and close-ups of steaming animal guts. And who is filming those group shots, hmm? But the Italian justice system was suitably convinced, as ten days after the film’s premiere Deodato was arrested on suspicion of murdering four of his actors. Only after gathering all four to appear together on Italian television and explaining to the court how the most grotesque sequences were filmed was he set free.

The special effects in Cannibal Holocaust are quite realistic; surely they are the basis for this film’s reputation, since its haphazard script, porn-quality acting and unimaginative direction don’t recommend it for anything but oblivion. There is no one unifying plot, but a series of related segments. First, there is a sequence where an NYU professor goes into the Amazon to recover “lost footage” from a team of missing documentary filmmakers. Next the footage is brought back to New York City; as in Zombi 2, New York is the counterpoint to the savage places where the action unfolds, the epitome of civilization. Then comes a short Mondo interlude, a “documentary” made by the team called “Last Road to Hell” which resembles Faces of Death in its montage of executions. The professor and some TV executives discuss turning this “lost footage” into a TV special in what is arguably the scene most relevant to the 21st century. In 2007 Court TV and Fox would be in a bidding war for a special chronicling the death of a documentary crew. The last section of the film is the most infamous: the crew’s “footage,” shot in glowing oversaturated color and cut together in a deliberately rough style. The last two sections of the film are held together by a series of wooden statements from the staff of the television channel: a swell of music is followed by the editor saying “I’ve added some stock music here,” etc. In a similarly obvious fashion, different characters act as the voices (literally) of different moral stances; the ruthless television producer, the rational professor, etc. They bluntly state over and over the message of the film: Western civilization, fed by a sensational media, is morally bankrupt, and causes the savagery it purports to oppose. The professor ends the film by stepping out of the viewing room into a sunny New York afternoon. As he walks away, he wonders in voiceover, “I wonder who the real cannibals are.” Pan up, cue music, thank you very much for coming ladies and gentlemen. Groan.

Deodato’s condemnation of Western society for its exploitation of native peoples would be a lot easier to swallow if he didn’t do so much exploiting himself. Cannibal Holocaust contains levels of casual animal cruelty, misogyny, and racism so high that it is the very definition of the flippant term “gore-porn.” One of the infamous scenes in the film is when members of the film crew kill a turtle and cut it open so its guts are splayed on the ground; the camera zooms in on the glistening internal organs of the turtle and lingers reverently, even lovingly. The effect of this real blood-and yes, there is a visceral horror to these scenes that could not be faked-is to equate the faked human deaths with these real animal deaths, and thereby debase the value of both animal and human life. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred by the six filmed deaths of animals in the film, and in this way the pleasure of watching the film is diminished for everyone but the cruelest of sadists.

Compounding this is the disrespect for women evident in Cannibal Holocaust’s pervasive nudity and rape. Out of the handful of sexual encounters graphically depicted in the film, only one could possibly be classified as “consensual,” and the performance of the actress in that scene makes it a big “possibly.” Rape is normalized by its frequency. A native woman gets raped and sodomized with a knife within the first twenty-four minutes of the film, and explorers watch from the brush, smirking, enjoying the show. Nudity and sexual humiliation are used as instruments of dominance over the native people (they are naked, therefore they are inferior) and of women in general (the female documentary crew member doesn’t fare much better) in a similar fashion as incidents like the Abu Ghraib prison photos. And the film’s crude perspective on sexual relations is matched by its lack of subtlety on the subject of racial diversity. The native Amazonian people in the film (not all of them cannibals) are uniformly portrayed as glassy-eyed, grimacing Neanderthals with sloping foreheads who shovel flesh into their mouths with both hands like animals. They do not speak, they hoot and yell wordlessly, and run in circles, waving their arms like chimpanzees. One tribe is depicted as having pitch black skin and tangled dreadlocks; these are the ones who will cut you open lengthwise without a word of hello (or in this case, a curious grunt). As in its treatment of rape, Cannibal Holocaust normalizes this stereotyping with sheer repetition; in one particularly egregious example, a native prisoner is kept on a leash like a dog. It all makes the tagline used in the U.S. trailer “Don’t look away! These are people, just like you!” painfully ironic.

It is revealed halfway through the film that the documentary crew is fond of faking events to get more compelling footage, and like everything else, the callousness of the film crew knows no bounds. They burn down a large communal hut with people inside and the cameraman yells “it’s beautiful!” as he films the terrified expressions on their faces. They stand next to the body of a young woman whose death they indirectly caused and sadly declaim the savagery of the jungle. The crew’s outright hypocrisy ruins the suspense of the film, because as soon as they start raping and shooting supposedly bloodthirsty people, one immediately thinks, “Well, of course they’re going to be killed in some disgusting way for all of this.” And indeed they are. The real flaw of Cannibal Holocaust, the thing that makes it so unwatchable, is the way it personifies the same hypocrisy as the film crew. It makes an argument against exploitation even as it indulges the most prurient of interests. And it does it all with a straight face. Would irony make it a better film? It’s hard to say.

Well, Deodato now has a chance to explore this question, as the remake of Cannibal Holocaust is due in 2009. Reportedly, he got the idea to re-make his most notorious film after seeing the 2005 feature Hostel and realizing that extreme gore doesn’t necessarily preclude mainstream success anymore. Everyone else involved with the original Cannibal Holocaust stands at arm’s length from it as if holding a piece of very stinky cheese. Even the folks at Grindhouse Releasing, who released an elaborate two disc boxed set of the film which they claim to be the only full director’s cut in circulation, include a disclaimer before the film. In it, they call the film a document of “a bygone era of extreme irresponsibility” and, despite the graphic inner sleeve design, claim they are only releasing the film because they believe in free speech.

But no one denies involvement with the director of Hostel, Eli Roth, who despite his obsession with the torture of attractive young women appears regularly on mainstream television shows like Late Night with Conan O’Brien. That may have changed, but the fears of First World moviegoers have not, as evidenced by the 2006 film Turistas. This film was directed by John Stockwell, better known for the surfing films Blue Crush and Into the Blue, and so has some very nice underwater photography, but not many chills. Though this film is lumped into the category of “gore porn,” even the unrated DVD version was nowhere near as gory as Cannibal Holocaust. The shock violence in this film is sporadic and very surgical in nature; the bad guy’s victims even get anesthetics. What Turistas does share with the earlier film is a “foreigners in trouble in an exotic jungle land” plot and a deep mistrust of non-whites.

It’s not worth the time and effort it would take to lay out all the main characters and the thrust of the plot; suffice to say it’s typical of any teen horror film made after 1996, but with stolen livers. What is interesting is the way Turistas reflects changes in racial attitudes over the past twenty five years. Turistas affects a much more knowing, multicultural stance than the Italian cannibal films; one character says to another, “oh my god, you are such a tourist,” and another, a corn rowed British woman, survives because of her Portuguese skills. While it still may be a white man’s world, it is no longer fashionable to assert dominance over non-whites. This has led to a growing fear, namely that someday being white and English-speaking will be a liability instead of an asset, that the victimizers will become the victims. It’s the same impulse that prompts television pundits to ask, “Why do they hate us? Is it for our freedom?”

Turistas also distances itself from Cannibal Holocaust in its eagerness to delineate between “good Brazilians” and “bad Brazilians,” going so far as to allow some character development in one character who feels guilty about leading hid new “gringo” friends to their doom. It may not sound like much, but after being defiled by Deodato’s worldview, a speaking part for a nonwhite character seems like a happy-go-lucky wonderland of equality. There really is only one “bad Brazilian,” anyway, and he is right out of a paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory: he removes all the usable organs from any “gringo” that passes by in retaliation for the organs Brazilians have been forced to sell on the black market. He robs from the vitamin-enhanced rich and gives to the infirm poor. Sounds like something John Bolton saw in a nightmare after tequila night at the U.N. It’s like Werner Herzog always says- something about the jungle brings out the worst in people.

In Part 2: The Man from Deep River and Cannibal Ferox, or How did it Ever Come to This?