Cannibal Holocaust

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST was for years reviled as one of the most repugnant and morally questionable of the 1970s spate of cannibal films--and possibly the most horrifying ever. But director Ruggero Deodato embarked upon the project with the intention of criticizing the very violence he was portraying. Set in the Amazonian jungles, the film is a pseudo-documentary that follows Professor Harold Moore (Robert Kerman) into the "Green Inferno" as he searches for a documentary crew that came to the jungle the previous year to make a film about the storied cannibals that lived there, and never made it back. Now, Moore meets some natives and discovers the footage from the crew's expedition, and upon returning to New York, he watches it to find out what really happened. The truth is too horrible for words, proving that savagery is not limited to indigenous peoples, and the morally outrageous film proceeds to indict the exploitative practices of certain documentary practices. However, the extremity of the violence portrayed was enough to put Deodato in hot water with the law, and with censors who claimed it was far too realistic. The career of the promising director, who had worked under a list of Italian luminaries that included Roberto Rossellini (ROME: OPEN CITY, PAISAN, VOYAGE IN ITALY), was essentially ended with this brutal, seminal film--for which he will nonetheless always be remembered.