Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1980
	Director: Ruggero Deodato (The Barbarians)
	Actors: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen
	Country: I
	Genre: Horror
	Conditions of visioning: 05.03.2014, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: An anthropologist (Kerman) travels to the Amazonian forest (known as The Green Inferno) looking for a missing documentary TV crew.
Review: I have selected as cover for this post one of the least graphical posters of this movie I could find. I have hidden the re-vamped exchangeable cover from the pristine Blu-ray edition by Shameless Entertainment Video at the end of the article. Cannibal Holocaust is a very special movie and if you are not into this genre, its only merit may be to make you wonder how far can cinema go? It is one of the most brutal movies ever made, and was banned from UK for decades. It is extremely violent and filled with what seems to be only provocative scenes: Sex, murder, cannibalism and maybe the most disturbing: animal cruelty. It is ironical that a British video company releases the best edition of the movie to date. I had only ever seen the movie on cheap VHS tapes, and the most recently (about ten years ago) on a cheap DiVx censored from all the violent scenes (what a disappointment it was). The image and sound quality on the Blu-ray are brilliant, except that I noticed some jitter between image and sound that varied throughout the movie so that I had to correct it a few times with my A/V amplifier. Slightly annoying. Besides the picture quality, the most interesting feature in this edition is a new edit of the movie supervised by the director himself, and in which he modified most of the animal cruelty scenes, editing them in a more creative and less provocative way, while keep the message he wanted to convey. This is the version I watched (The Blu-ray contains both). The director introduces this version for five minutes, justifying his choices. The movie is still very brutal, but a bit less disturbing. One interesting element to keep from the movie is the way the story is told: the first half of the movie is about the looking for the TV-crew, the second half about what to do with the video tapes found in the forest. This second part is like a reflection about what to do with the movie Cannibal Holocaust itself. The movie also contains a sub-text about the integrity of a TV-crew violating an otherwise virgin natural environment. I CANNOT recommend the movie to anybody as it is too extreme, but I am glad to have seen it in the best conditions possible before watching at the Munich Fantasy Filmfest Nights 2014 the homage Eli Roth produced and entitled The Green Inferno.
Rating: 4 /10