Is it just me, or does Thanksgiving make you think of Italian cannibal movies, too?
Ah. November; bowls of stuffing and mashed potatoes, peas and carrots slathered with butter, steaming ladles of dark rich gravy, a golden-brown turkey carved on a platter- and a steady stream of Euro-gore on the DVD player. Those movies remind me of 42nd street’s glory days. Before the Deuce was kid-friendly, marquees outside seedy movie palaces proferred lurid photos of women impaled on stakes and swarthy natives in Prince Valiant hairdos munching on ribbons of steaming intestines. Winos, hookers, hustlers, drug dealers, pimps and assorted Popeyes paused before the posters to ponder how the world had spun so crazily out of control. Then they’d say, “One ticket for the 3:45, please….”
Italian cannibal movies were that repugnant- and also that pervasive. The bizarre exploitation genre sprang from the surprisingly popular Mondo films (Mondo Cane, Mondo Pazzo, Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Freudo), which were like National Geographic specials on crack. But gradually the fad for real atrocity footage from around the globe faded and was slowly replaced with movies about unwary travelers in the Amazon coming face-to-face with natives who look at Western people as brunch.
The Man From Deep River by Umberto Lenzi got the ball rolling. In the film a tribe of savages torture a European photographer (Ivan Rassimov) who has journeyed into the treacherous wilds of Southeast Asian. The photographer even marries the chief’s daughter (Me Me Lai– a former TV hostess who was nude in a ton of these films).
Then in 1977 came Jungle Holocaust by Reggero Deodato and Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals (called Trap Them And Kill Them on 42nd St.) by Joe D’Amato, followed by Eaten Alive!, also by Lenzi, which stole scenes outright from another director’s movie.
Lenzi’s 1981 masterpiece Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly) rates “98 on the vomit meter” for its unparalleled scenes of sadism by Joe Bob Briggs. It’s also one of my very favorites. The movie is about a group who travel into the rain forests of Paraguay to prove that cannibalism is a myth. Are they in for a surprise. Their appalling behavior while interacting with a village tribe causes the natives to violently retaliate. Hooks in breasts, castration, and chowing down on innards await these intrepid travelers.
But the Citizen Kane of Italian cannibal movies is Reggero Deodato’s 1981 Cannibal Holocaust. It’s the movie that The Blair Witch Project ripped off. Grindhouse Releasing put out a beautiful Special Edition Blu-ray for this (and also for Cannibal Ferox) so a double-bill after desert on Thanksgiving will be a special treat. It’s so infamous that its director almost went to jail for murder.
The film follows a Manhattan professor who is trying to discover what happened to four documentary filmmakers who disappeared while investigating the “Green Inferno” region of the Amazon river. He eventually meets the tribe that is responsible for their demise and finds the filmmakers bones neatly stacked and the cans of film that they shot hanging from trees. But when the professor returns to New York, he screens the footage and a very different picture emerges.
The foursome- Alan Yates, Jack Anders, Faye Daniels and Mark Tomaso- are ruthless and think nothing of staging things for a good story. They invade a small village and set fire to the huts to make it look like a warring tribe razed it. They tear open a large turtle, shoot a small boar, cut a snake in half. They capture a native woman, and take turns raping her in the mud, laughing. They even impale her on a stake while shaking their heads sadly on camera, saying, “I can’t understand such cruelty..”
But the Yanamamo (Tree People) get revenge and kill the journalists off. One of them is castrated. Daniels is raped and beheaded. And the jerky handheld camera captures Yates’s bloody face as he is set upon by the tribe. The TV station manager demands the film be destroyed. Finally, at the end, the professor steps into the sunlight and shakes his head. He asks, “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”
To augment the film’s documentary feel, Deodato asked his actors to sign releases promising they wouldn’t appear in any other film for one year. But when he was arrested in Italy and brought to trial- the courts thought this was an actual snuff movie- he frantically tried to track them down to prove it wasn’t true. The charges were eventually dropped, but the movie was banned in country after country, and is reviled for its depiction of actual violence to animals. (The Blu-ray has an animal-cruelty-free option of watching the film).
When I saw the movie on Times Square my friends and I looked at each other in nervous shock afterwards, not knowing what to say. Fortunately, a stranger stood up and exclaimed, “This is some fucked-up shit.” I couldn’t have said it any better.
With all the grade-school indoctrination about happy pilgrims breaking bread with Native Americans and what we now know about how Americans really operate when they invade foreign soil, doesn’t this movie seem even more relevant and appropriate?
Who’s for more pumpkin pie?
