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DVD Review: Cannibal Holocaust Uncut (25th Anniversary Edition)
By John Marrone
Aug 29, 2006, 01:13

Directed by:  Ruggero Deodato
Running time:  101 mins
Body count:  20 people/5 animals

- trailer (real media)  

Ive watched horror films for about 30 years now and often while combing the annals of horror history I would hear of the great Cannibal Holocaust - a film so brutal and horrific and white with the sinewy entrails of gutted kill that the filmmakers were arrested upon its premiere and the footage seized.  The mystery of an unseen legend such as this - the labels and warnings...  I wondered - what atrocities did Cannibal Holocaust truly hold?  Recently taking home the uncut 25th Anniversary Edition DVD, I'd finally come upon the threshold of this mac-daddy of nausea.  It was time to find out for myself if it truly lived up to the hype.

If you have seen Cannibal Ferox (review) then you know the basic plot outline, as they're extremely similar.  Four filmmakers travel to the border of Peru and Brazil to enter the Green Inferno - the Amazon jungle.  Disappearing as two other crews had before them, the New York University soon hires Professor Harold Monroe (played by R Bolla of Debbie Does Dallas) to gather a guide and a captured native prisoner and find the previously unseen Tree tribe and the four missing dipshits that trotted off into the woods.  Needless to say, nothing but their worm ridden skeletons are found, and the film footage is taken back to the states.

The story and acting are quality, but what truly assaults your senses are the scenes of violence, as they hunt and divulge lost footage to the university.  The blend of real animal killings and outstanding special effects will have the most seasoned veteran with their hand on the pause button trying to find fault in the detail, as these brutalities look real, and will freak you the hell out.

What specifically can you expect from this uncut shocker?  Leeches.  Maggot ridden corpses.  Vomit.  Blisters.  A muskrat slayed with a knife in slow death detail.  A native eats its warm, raw stomach.  There's brutal rape scenes with stone spike insertions that bleed profusively.  Women are taken and disembowled at will.  There's full frontal nudity, men and women.  They drink white native goo out of cups.  Eat raw dripping human organs.  Behead and gut a huge tortoise that just squirms for all the life he's worth while its innards spill all over the shore.  A guy gets amputated and then cauderized with a hot machete.  A pig gets shot in the neck, for real. 

Think thats bad?  Then turn away 'cuz a monkey gets his face macheted off next - for real.  Theres huge spiders and beetles, gang rapes and shrunken heads.  A fetus even gets pulled out of someones womb and then buried alive in the mud!  You'll see it all!  Castrations - yes a penis is amputated with a dull stone knife...  And dont close your eyes yet.  There's that woman skewered on that pole, in one end and out the other...  Everything but turds man!  You'll supply that when you see this for yourself.  Its a horror masterpiece.

Final Analysis:  What more is there to say.  Cannibal Holocaust - the 25th Anniversary Uncut Edition is the measuring stick by which we judge all other horror films that claim to test your stomach.  The way its filmed, it infects your imagination with that grey, undefined line between what is real and what is not - and as you're sucked into this brutal and well told story, you'll start to lose track of which is which.  This just adds to the horror that you will feel squirm in your stomach upon enduring this film.  See it uncut.  Its the "La Fin Absolue Du Monde" of real life - the nausea horror spectacle which all other champions are compared to.