"Shut your stinking bastard face and pull your trousers up". That right there is the first thing I uttered to Sergio Leone in this dream I had one time. Thinking back, there's a few other things I wish I'd a said alongside that shit. I wish I'd have told him that yeah, everybody thinks Once Upon A Time In America is a masterpiece and all, but what The Duke thinks is that it's a wretched, misogynist wank-fantasy, and not even a cool, inventive one, but a really, really uninspired one, like maybe you already had a fumble a half-hour ago and now it's not cause you got these demented ideas in your head, it's just cause there's fuck all on telly.
Cheer up, though, I'd have said. It's not all bad. I think those spaghetti films you did with John Wayne were amazing. And Once Upon A Time In The West, too. I can get behind that, Leone.
But what I wish I said most of all, is something along the lines of "You were right, y'know. Cannibal Holocaust is a damn masterpiece."
What Sergio Leone did back in the day, y'see, was that he sat down for to view Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Sometime between then and a little while later, he composed a letter to Deodato, which read as follows;
"Dear Ruggero", waxed Leone. "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."
Leone knew the score, man. And he was right. Deodato did indeed get in trouble with all the world. Especially the part of it that sat down to watch Cannibal Holocaust of an evening.
Now, back in the day The Duke waxed all about Why Cannibal Holocaust Is A Damn Masterpiece, but to be honest, I never felt I did it justice. So what I decided to do about ten minutes ago is to start scribbling a new-fangled essay on the subject, possibly with crap CGI monkeys in place of all the silly old stuff from years gone past.
That old article ain't going no-place though, man. Don't be jumping on me about how I'm raping your childhood and so on. You ain't gonna have to scour eBay for pirate copies of the original one like what you remember.
Anyhow, the crux of the matter is this;
Back in the day, Italian horror flick producers decided that the thing to do would be to make a shitload of flicks regarding the cannibals for to go alongside the shitload of flicks regarding the zombies. Unlike the shitload of zombie numbers, though, the likes of Lucio Fulci's incredible Zombie Flesh Eaters, or The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, the cannibal flicks were mostly an unutterably boring bunch of grime-faced bastards. Bar The Mountain Of The Cannibal God or maybe half of Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox, there ain't a whole lot to be getting overly excited about.
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Article comments
1 - dbcooper
In an article called "Disturbo 13: The Most Disturbing Horror Films Ever Made" by Stanley Wiater, he calls this film one of the most disturbing ever made.
Some things Wiater has to say about Cannibal Holocaust:
"The most brutal of the already incredibly savage series of cannibal films produced by Italian filmmakers in the 1970s........the very idea of animals being literally butchered as part of a fictional story where human beings are supposedly butchered is morally indefensible......in what it says about the human condition, the film just gets darker, bleaker and bloodier......."
Additional films on this list included Salo, 120 Days of Salom, Man Behind the Sun, I Spit On Your Grave, Bloodsucking Freaks, Last House on the Left, Maniac, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, In a Glass Cage, Nekromantik, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Combat Shock, Eraserhead and, of course, Cannibal Holocaust.
I am a huge horror fan, though when it comes to extreme gore, I'm a lightweight. I saw Saw for the first time the other night and was offended by that film (though how derivative it was pissed me off more than the actual gore, dirty toilets, mold, etc....). Films that are as rank, nasty and demented as Saw leave me feeling repulsed and unclean. I suspect Cannibal Holocaust makes Saw seem like Pollyanna.
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
db cooper, the first article i wrote about this flick, linked to up in the article itself, was greeted by a comment quoting that exact same article! Coincidences, man.
But yeah, Saw pales into insignificance next to this. I think there's more to it, though, than just the bloodshed and the grotesqueries, hence my decision to wax at length regarding its worth.
"the very idea of animals being literally butchered as part of a fictional story where human beings are supposedly butchered is morally indefensible"
I agree, but i wonder if Waiter mentions this when he goes about discussing Apocalypse Now or Strike by Sergei Eisenstien.