THE IMPORTANCE OF CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
It was the early 80’s, the waning days of 42nd Street,. Home video was emptying the theaters. This was going to be the last decade of “the Deuce”. With domestic product being exciting as pablum, distributors brought in grotesque imports from Italy and other countries. A film called Cannibal Ferox was changed to Make Them Die Slowly(1981) by NYC based Aquarius Releasing. It ran ten straight weeks at The Liberty Theater on 42nd Street. And it was brought back twice after that run.
Cannibal films were considered bottom of the film flotsam barrel. But distributors and exhibitors made bank on these films. First up was Unberto Lenzi’s Deep River Savages,(1972) aka The Man from Deep River, aka Sacrifice. I saw it as Sacrifice paired with Autopsy. I think there are two different cuts of this film as the Media Blasters DVD is different than the Raro Blu Ray.
Ruggerio Deodato’s Last Cannibal World(1977) was a rougher ride. This one got rereleased as Carnivorous on a double bill with Raw Meat advertised as “Goreorama“. Then it was released as Cannibal, then The Last Survivor, then Jungle Holocaust. Among the atrocities in this film , actress Me Me Lay was decapitated and spit roasted. World Video released it in a clamshell and Media Blasters released the DVD.
Deodato’s strength as a director was that he would lead you into expect the worst, then give you exactly that. His films were brutally violent. But I spent three days at a convention and Ruggerio was signing close by me. When he ran out of Jungle Holocaust DVDs, his manager asked if he could buy mine. I gave them to him for my cost. I took a break and when I returned, there was a pile of signed stuff that he left on my chair. He was a gentleman and I enjoyed his company.
Eaten Alive(1980) was another Umberto Lenzi effort that not only cannibalized footage from Deep River Savages, it took Me Me Lia’s death scene from Jungle Holocaust as well. Jim Jones type of plot with Italian porn star,Paulo Senatore, getting chomped on in a cheap effect. Another highlight is a dildo dipped in cobra venom. It was also released as Doomed to Die and Eaten Alive by Cannibals.
Trap Them and Kill Them(1977) was Emmanuel and the Last Cannibals. Directed by Joe D’Amato, it dispenses with the animal cruelty and castration scenes. Instead we get some close to hardcore sex scenes instead. Laura Gemser makes this one worth a look. Slave of the Cannibal God(1978) aka The Mountain of the Cannibal God had two major stars, Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. Highlights were a cannibal midget, Ursula naked, and a monkey being eaten by a python. Oddly the film was at The Times Square Theater on a triple bill with The Street Fighter and Return of the Street Fighter. Then the afore mentioned Make them Die Slowly.
Cannibal Holocaust(1980) was shrouded in mystery and controversy from the get go. Chas Balum praised it in his Deep Red Magazine. His quote read something like this: “ the film is like taking a kick to the groin with a steel toed boot. It makes you puke, then lick up the puke”. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but hell, I was intrigued. So the film opened locally , at The Welmont Theater in Montclair NJ. It opened on a Wednesday, by Friday it was pulled due to complaints about the animal cruelty.
So I went to 42nd Street. I thought I had seen it at The Liberty, but I was drinking and smoking a lot back then. It was at The Harris co billed with the Dragon’s Revenge. The Harris was at the far end of the right side of the block, one of the more dangerous parts of the Deuce, it was close to The New Barracks, a gay bath house whose stench reached the street, Tops Bar, a hive of criminal activity, and the New Amsterdam Theater.
Where Make them Die Slowly drew a rowdy crowd, Holocaust pummeled the crowd into stunned silence. Someone behind me was retching, a woman patron was sobbing when the woman on screen was killed. The film was unrelenting, grim and sadistic. It ran at the Harris for two weeks. I never saw it advertised again. Some people claim that it ran in other theaters there, but I don’t recall any. But I wasn’t there every day either so maybe it did.
People honestly believed what they were seeing was real. Deodato had the cast vanish for about a year. I remember reading that prints were seized by the Italian government . I think he had to produce the actress or face murder charges. This film really fired people up and still does to this day.
Truth was the fucker was just to grim. So I never saw it again until I got involved with conventions. I didn’t know that it was released in Japan the same time as E.T.. It out drew E.T. for weeks. So it was out on a Japanese Laser disc and that was the source for bootleg VHS tapes. So that would be the second time I saw it. I got the tape at the first Chiller con. Oddly the nudity was cropped but the violence wasn’t. The thing was the prints were all cut. Another sketchy company, Cult Epics, put it out on DVD as “the Mother of all Cannibal Movies”.
Grindhouse Releasing put the film out completely restored. Some stores refused to carry it because of the cover art. Star , Robert Kerman had disowned the film because of the animal cruelty. In interviews he said he prayed that the film would fail. Robert was a fixture in NYC lensed porn under the name R. Bolla. He starred in three of these films. Seems he traded one form of pornography for another.
So why is Cannibal Holocaust important? It is a piece of Grindhouse History that shocked and horrified viewers. It was unrelenting in it’s terror and horrific in it’s violence. It beat up it’s audience from start to finish and the real reason that it worked and some of these other films worked was no one had ever done this before, no one. The cannibal film cycle only lasted a couple of years .
They stained the screens of 42nd Street and left their mark.
To try to duplicate it is a joke, you can’t, it worked because of the time period, because that era was truly wild west. You could get away with almost anything and film makers gave us some our most cherished depravities back then. So sorry, Eli, I know you love the film , but that Green Inferno was just a home movie, it didn’t work.
So now fans have a unique opportunity to see these films in Drive Ins and Theaters. Grindhouse Releasing is taking Cannibal Holocaust on the road. So check out their website as it may be coming to a theater close to you. Grindhousereleasing.com.