Pablo's Review of Cannibal Holocaust
When I first entered KMC I remember there was a thread here in the horror forum whose topic was: What's the most violent movie you've seen ?
I said Evil Dead, but then Backfire (When I first met him) said that Cannibal Holocaust made Evil Dead look tame, so I was interested in the film and did a little reserach. It appeares that this movie is banned in the states so it was impossible for me to one day ever see it, since here in Mexico almost all of the DVDs released are huge blockbusters.
But that changed when a new neighbor arrived here in my street, he's this cokehead from Canada that appearently got the Region 0 DVD in Italy, it's a 2 disc DVD so I doubt it's censored at all. So he lent it to me, and I had heard lots of stuff about how this movie was totally intense and brutal and how I HAD to see it, so I checked it out. The first thing that popped into my head when the credits rolled is: OVER HYPED SHIT !
I’ll give this perverted attention seeking bastard this: the overall storyline was decent enough in its simplicity and the film succeeded in its “mockcumentary” ambitions, with the "found footage” in particular feeling very genuine, and therefore, giving it more impact. But if there was one thing that truly stood out in this abattoir, it was hand downs, the excessive gore which was astounding in its realism. Taking into account the low budget and the time frame in which the film was shot...that was quite a feat! How the hell did they pull off that penis cutting scene? Or the impaled through her vagina out of her mouth naked broad? Amazing work.
Where the film failed me was that I never got to warm up to any of the one-layer characters and in consequence, the weight of the nutty events was considerably lessened. I just felt so detached from it all! Let’s see what we got: a “blah” anthropologist, his pipe, his boys and his annoying New York based peers. I didn’t give a bitches ass about any of them…nice pipe though…NICE PIPE! Then we had the despicable “evil” twits that were the missing crew. Well, the only pleasure I derived from these mo-mos was finally seeing them get slaughtered in mucho vicious ways. Man, I loathed that gang! Lastly, we had the joyous “tribe people" who once more confirmed to me that seeing adults act like naïve, bunny-hopping, gibberish-talking, simpletons is just not my cup of plasma.
While yes this movie is totally brutal it really doesn't do much to you because there's zero depth to the characters and the movie itself is boring. It's basically execution after execution.