Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is the very definition of Controversial Cinema. The film that saw its director hauled through the courts accused of killing his cast, one of the original Video Nasties in the UK and a cause celebré pretty much everywhere it played (or was banned) thanks to a heady mix of cine verité realism, ultra violence and authentic animal killings (of which more later). Your reviewer first saw it as a kid in 1982, and was genuinely distressed by the experience; it would be years before I could bring myself to watch it again. The sheer power of the film to disturb, shock and split audiences has rarely been matched, and it remains as potent an experience now as it was in 1980.

I’d imagine most of you are familiar with the story by now – four documentary filmmakers vanish in the Amazon rain forest, and a university professor (Robert Kerman, aka R. Bolla) manages to track down their footage. On returning to New York, he soon discovers that the unedited film shows the crew committing assorted atrocities against the tribes people of the Amazon, only to meet retribution at the hands of cannibals.

While not the first faked documentary, Cannibal Holocaust certainly invented the ‘found footage’ genre that has since been popularised in films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield and others. While the framing structure is very much a standard feature film – albeit one with some pretty brutal imagery – the found footage, shot on 16mm and dirtied up, looks pretty damned authentic, thanks to a combination of improvised performances (shot in English, which means no dubbing to distract), surprisingly good special effects, hand-held camerawork and that troubling animal slaughter. While the credits, the framing scenes and the fact that the film was released by United Artists should’ve been enough to show that this wasn’t some ghastly snuff movie, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that ignorant trading standards officers were still claiming the footage to be real well into the 1990s in the UK. And of course, Deodato carefully muddies the waters – genuine documentary footage from war zones is announced as fake while the animal killings are clearly real; given this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that people were confused.

There’s no questioning the fact that this is a very well made, very effective and fiercely intelligent piece of film-making – unquestionably the high spot of both the cannibal movie sub genre and Deodato’s career. The film is remarkably fresh feeling – only the film scratches, now a commonplace gimmick and here a little too animated looking in this new HD print, feel dated. It will certainly continue to upset many viewers, even those hardened to ultragore cinema. But if you can take it, the film is a potent, powerful, challenging masterpiece.

Previous UK editions have suffered from extensive censorship, so it’s gratifying to see a bit of common sense come into play with this edition. All the sexual violence (none of which is vaguely erotic) is now intact, as is most of the animal slaughter, the BBFC having accepted that this is animal killing rather than animal cruelty. There’s one 15 second cut (or more precisely, 15 seconds of alternate footage in the scene where a struggling, squealing muskrat is killed – it’s not an important plot moment (unlike some of the other animal scenes) and surely only serial killers in training could complain about its removal.

In any case, this scene was also removed by Deodato for his new Director’s Edit, that is also included here. This has been erroneously referred to as the animal killing-free version, but the more sensitive should note that this isn’t the case – rather, the more gratuitous moments have been trimmed down, but (unlike the version on the US Grindhouse edition, where the ‘cruelty free’ version simply removes these scenes entirely) Deodato has kept plot-significant moments intact – you’ll still see animals die, just not quite as brutally.

Shameless have certainly pulled out all the stops for this blu-ray edition. Not only a spanking new print and double-sided sleeve that features the notorious Go Video cover artwork, but extensive new extras – a 40 minute featurette with Deodato and star Carl Gabriel Yorke that is interesting and informative, though perhaps not as good as the one made by Grindhouse (no shame in that, as that documantary was truly excellent), and another 40 minute documentary where Deodato and Yorke and joined by actress Francesca Ciardi and critic Kim Newman, as well as some academics who spout nonsense about Mondo movies that they probably haven’t seen and discuss the violence towards women in the film (because of course, no male characters are killed) that might have fans groaning in annoyance. A decent pairing that, alongside extensive Shameless trailers (who knew they’d released so much?) and an Easter Egg that I forgot to look for and so can come as an exciting surprise for you, makes this a very impressive package for a film once seen as a cinematic pariah.

Pretty much the essential purchase of the month, I would say...

DAVID FLINT

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