CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (R Deodato)

( Ruggero Deodato / 1980 )

Deodato's mondo horror wants to be both celebrated and reviled but is too bound up in horror convention and general incompetence to truly be either. Harold Monroe, anthropologist, travels into the Amazonian jungle to recover the filmed footage from an earlier documentary crew for a TV company who want to use the footage in a sensationalist feature. Upon discovering that the reason the earlier expedition never made it back was because they were killed in retaliation for a series of atrocities committed against the tribespeople Monroe begins to question who the real savages were.

Clerici's story could be the basis for a great film: 'found footage' sequences - when done right - lend an unbeatable immediacy to the proceedings, and the framing device offers plenty of opportunity to analyse the symbiotic relationship between horror and its audience. Unfortunately, the intelligent and promising undercurrent is made redundant through the overwhelming desire of HOLOCAUST to be as gruesome as possible at the expense of anything else. The film's apparent central question of 'who are the real savages?' is turned into a mockery of through gleeful scenes - every ten minutes or so, whether it makes narrative sense or not - of tribal brutality as part of their inherent culture. As an attack on imperialistic attitudes, although the Westerners are portrayed as brutes and get their comeuppance, Deodato and Clerici only allow you a name or a character if you are white. HOLOCAUST also pretends to be a film which attacks the staged documentaries of MONDO CANE and its ilk (or even of more mainstream fare) as barbaric and exploitative, presumably hoping the audience will forget about the scenes of animal death or how, rather than making up names, Clerici adopts the names of actual South American tribes for his fiction. Even ignoring any supposed allegory and just taking the film as unadorned horror the 'found footage' lacks any proper sense of development, it's just a simple, highly elliptical selection of scenes, first showing the expedition torment the tribespeople, then the tribespeople torment the expedition.

Regardless of all of this HOLOCAUST is occasionally an arresting film. Helped by Sergio D'Offizi's loose but stylised camerawork, there are moments where HOLOCAUST reveals what it could have been if not for its rampant hypocrisy and single-minded intentions. Strangely, it's in one of the films most infamous sequences that the film appears to achieve its promise of being both intelligent and revolting. In a 'found footage' segment the expedition need food so they behead and gut a turtle for food and the girl, Faye, runs off and vomits before coming back to have her share. It's a scene that has been cut for reasons of animal cruelty in many countries, yet in real life the turtle was given to the natives for dinner and so if this turtle was not killed then another animal would have been killed in its place. In Faye's hypocritical reaction you can find commentary on our own hypocritical reaction: how many people would be disgusted by an abbatoir but eat meat every day? It suggests that what we think of as 'savage' is in actuality just honesty: to eat we need to butcher animals, and this is actually closer to what it is to be human than the 'civilised' method of denying our butchery by hiding it in specialised buildings.

Having said all of this, considering the lack of thought in just about every single other area of the film this kind of analysis is sadly open to charges to 'emperor's new clothes' and it could be hard to defend against this accusation. The only consistant aspect of HOLOCAUST is the excellence of Riz Ortolani's score. Made up of two distinct approaches, one - tribal drums and ominous synth - is exactly what you would expect to find in an 80s cannibal movie, but the other - lilting orchestration - is what you would expect to find in a twee documentary and its ironic intrusion at the most inappropriate and violent moments is probably the most pleasing and intelligent thing about HOLOCAUST as a finished product.