HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 42
Six decades: 2nd of 2 films from the 80's

This is a big one for me. A big gap in my horror movie watching career (LOL, I love the idea of that being a career! I'd be so fucking professional and dedicated at that job). I often say these gaps come down to a random factor - I shake my head and shrug and go "Gee wiz, I just never got around to it." But up until a couple of years ago, this is a film I probably would have said I have no intention of ever seeing. Yes, even I, fearless gorehound that I now am, was a squeamish little snowflake up until recently. I was literally scared of this movie, I think.

And although I got over that a while back and put this on my watchlist, I still thought it might be so extreme that it might fuck me up a little. So I don't know if it's that overhyping in my mind which meant it did no such thing.

Don't get me wrong, there's some pretty horrible content in here - some real nasty shit. And the practical effects are really well done and quite convincing. But here's the thing for me about Cannibal Holocaust which I think stops it being (a) deeply disturbing for me and hence (b) a truly great horror film: although this is DEFINITELY a genuine found footage film, and deserving of real credit for its innovativeness, this is an Italian exploitation film. This is obviously a milieu I adore, but if there's one thing Italsploitation films have in common it's a, let's say, less than 100% commitment to realism and convincingness in the acting stakes. With a better group of actors, Cannibal Holocaust could have been an absolute mindfuck. But the illusion that this was going for, that this was all real, was pretty much totally shattered by the obvious artifice of the performances.

That's not to say I didn't think it was good. It's still legitimately horrific and constructed in a really interesting way. It was a little bit of a nice surprise to me that it didn't even descend to some of the more horrible practices of Italian cannibal films of the day. I really couldn't get along with The Man From Deep River because of its, what I thought was, heinous depiction of Asian native cultures and also its wall to wall animal cruelty. Now, there is some pretty gross footage of animal death in Cannibal Holocaust but I have less of a problem with it because although animals are killed, they're killed in the same way they probably get killed every day by the native cultures in the Amazon - pretty quickly and perfunctorily. I'm not arguing it's OK for film makers to do that, but it's just a bit less difficult to endure than the stuff which is in Man from Deep River, where we have to watch a monkey writhing in abject terror with its head in a vice before some asshole cuts the top of its head off.

Also, the native Amazonians in this movie are treated positively sympathetically. It's the American film makers who are the bad guys, very obviously. The orgy of violence in which they finally get slaughtered feels like the only way these poor jungle dwellers could deal with the obvious threat of these guys. In fact, it feels like the natives are painted as having been deeply traumatised by the whole thing, so that even their own violence, horrific as it is, is something of which they too were the victims.

The Riz Ortolani score is famous for being a strangely melancholy soundtrack for such a viscerally nihilistic film, but I think that's why. Because I'm not sure Cannibal Holocaust is really all that nihilistic. There's a message here about how colonialism and westernisation makes monsters of its victims for its own ends. Coming from Australia, I see parallels with the experience of the Australian aborigines, who it could be argued continue to be seen as monsters by huge swathes of the white Australian population, or lost causes at least - and so the self-serving moralising continues as it has since the late 18th century. And there are clear parallels wherever the white folks have planted flags on this world. What better than Ortolani's mournful score to accompany this story of exploitation and degradation? It's like the story of our species in an explosive little nutshell. Horror is entirely the appropriate emotional response.

This is an aside, but maybe someone can solve this little mystery for me:

When I was bumming through South America about 15 years ago, I noticed that the Ecuadoreans have a remarkable social tolerance to images of violence and gore. A quick glance at any newspaper would invariably show a large, explicit photograph of some dead guy with his chest ripped open or something like that. And in towns, I used to notice that every single video store (they had plenty) would dress its window to promote really gory and extreme looking horror movies. Anyway, the first time I even heard of Cannibal Holocaust was on this trip, because a lot of places were advertising a film called, and I really feel like I remember this vividly, Cannibal Holocaust 2. It made an impact because I found that title really funny, just because it's such an extreme sounding name for a movie. So obviously, I want to track this down but according to Letterboxd there's no sequel to this? Is this like a Zombi 2 situation and, if so, what has this been renamed as???