WINTER OF DISCONTENT : Cannibal Holocaust (part one: animals were harmed during the making of this picture)

Apologies for the lack of screenshots. I neglected to take any while I was watching the film and I don’t feel like reacquainting myself with it just yet.

It’s one thing to announce in a fanfare of self-publicity that you’re devoting six weeks on your blog to all things exploitative. Yeah, you’ve got stockpile of gialli to go at. Sure, you can use ‘Shortbus’ as a jumping off point to consider the, ahem, insertion of unsimulated sexual activity into an otherwise non-porno flick. It’s as easy as pie to take the piss out of something as bog-awful as ‘Fight for Your Life’. You can pride yourself on watching ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’ without needing to break halfway through for a trip to the nearest decontamination plant.

You can line up a slew of scurrilous titles – look out for ‘Rope and Skin’, ‘The Candy Snatchers’ (thanks, Bryce!), ‘The House on Straw Hill’ and ‘Gator Bait’ next week – and happily wallow in a mudpool of cinematic filth.

But it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing them cannibals.

And if you’re going to kit yourself out with a sick bag and some anti-malarial pills and head into the green inferno, then you may as well accept the inevitable and square up to the most infamous cannibal movie – if not the most infamous movie – of all time: Ruggero Deodato’s ‘Cannibal Holocaust’.

This movie didn’t just upset the BBFC and the DPP. It upset fucking everyone. When Deodato’s friend and fellow director Sergio Leone wrote “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”, he had no idea how prescient this remark was.

Less than a fortnight after ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ premiered in Milan in 1980, prints were seized by the authorities and Deodato arrested. The charge? That he’d killed the four actors playing the missing documentarians as well as an indigenous actress who is shown impaled on a pole in one of the film’s most notorious images. In a hoist-by-one’s-own-petard twist, Deodato had insisted that his cast sign clauses denying them appearances in any media for a year following the film’s release; an obvious publicity stunt to play up the missing people/found footage aspect. Deodato produced the very much alive actors before the court and successfully demonstrated how the special effects had been achieved. The murder charges were dropped, but he was still convicted of obscenity and received a four-month suspended sentence. The court also banned the film, a decision it took Deodato three years to get overturned.

The obscenity prosecution owed to the unstaged animal deaths. Which is where this review gets thorny. The animal deaths in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ are kind of like the hardcore inserts in ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’. Whatever level you discuss these two films on, whichever angle you come at them from, there’s no getting away from it. No avoiding it. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ contains real animal deaths and ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’ contains hardcore pornographic footage. It’s up to the viewer to determine their own moral and critical standpoint.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to say “harrumph, animals were killed in front of the camera, disgusting behaviour, I wash my hands of this film”. An easy response, a justified response, and a completely self-defeating response. Unless you’re a vegetarian, every time you sit down to a meal you are complicit in the death of an animal. (I’m not a vegetarian by the way: I subscribe to Dennis Leary’s observation that “eggplant tastes like eggplant but meat tastes like murder and murder tastes pretty fucking good”.) So how come I can happily tuck into a chicken casserole, a rump steak, a pan-fried salmon or a rack of ribs but feel physically sick when I see a turtle being killed, gutted, cooked and eaten on camera in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’? Is it because I don’t see how the chicken meets its end? In fact, the turtle that ran afoul of Deodato and his crew probably had a better life – free and in the wilds right up till that final moment – than the chicken that was doubtlessly bred, lived and died in the miserable conditions of a battery farm, a chicken that existed solely to become the main ingredient in my casserole.

Then there’s the fact that ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ was a cheaply made Italian exploitation film released in 1980 – ie. not the kind of production monitored by the American Humane Association. This isn’t a justification, it’s a statement of fact. Pick any cannibal movie by an Italian director from the 70s or 80s and unsimulated animal deaths are virtually guaranteed. You can throw the argument wider: check out any number of Hollywood productions (particularly westerns) pre-mandatory AHA supervision. I wouldn’t change a frame of either of them, and certainly never call for them to be banned, but the chickens at the start of Peckinpah’s ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ and the lizard whose slo-mo demise opens ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ – they got the same deal as Deodato’s turtle.

Now consider the BBFC’s decision to pass ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ with an 18-certificate following almost six minutes’ worth of cuts. Including the turtle evisceration sequence in its entirety, as well as the deaths of a snake, a spider, a monkey and pig. Does the film become a less thorny, more easily watchable work in this version? The answer has to be no: the turtle, the pig, the snake, the spider and not one but two monkeys still died (the superannuation of monkey murder was so that Deodato could get a reverse shot); cutting these scenes and pretending that the film is now significantly less contentious is at best an exercise in denial. As is a question I’ve seen posted on a forum: “How can I see ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ without the animal deaths?” Talk about a machine-washable morality! If the only way someone can rationalize approaching ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ is without these scenes, particularly if the issue of animal deaths is completely abhorrent to them, then surely they should be boycotting the film in any version as a matter of principle.

There’s a time and a place for debating the artistic, aesthetic or intellectual merit (or otherwise) of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, and I’ll dip a toe into those waters in the final part of this review, but it should be mentioned that all-too-often the requirement is placed on the individual to separate the artist from the art. Many of the great directors have been control freaks and bullies. Most of the great conductors: tyrants. Most of the great writers: depressives and alcoholics. Most of the great musicians: junkies. Do we stop watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ because of what Kubrick put Malcolm McDowell through? Do we consign ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ to the scrapheap because Wagner was an anti-semite? Do we refuse to listen to a world-class recording of it because the conductor was once a member of the National Socialist Party?

Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal aesthetics. I approached ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ for two reasons: (i) to make up my own mind; and (ii) a sense of half-prurient half-academic curiosity. Could this movie really be as shocking, brutal and controversial as its reputation would have it?

Join me tomorrow and we’ll take a murky trek through that green inferno.