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Scrape away the self-reflexivity of Cannibal Holocaust and you still get the satirical education of "devourers," as Wharton would have it (cf. "Xingu"). New York City is sketched swiftly in the Euro-sleaze style (five-o'clock-shadow lighting across skyscrapers, theater marquees and "Save their souls" signs, dubbed proclamations of "shitface") before the shift to the jungle, a Buñuelian transposition. (La Mort en ce Jardin is evoked throughout.) Gringos in the "Paraguayan Amazon" for the dissertation of the grad student (Lorraine De Selle), determined to disprove cannibalism as "an invention of racist colonialism." Her brother (Danilo Mattei) asks for directions while her friend (Zora Kerova) offers herself to the jefe de policia, who points them toward the green inferno with a jolly "Viva America!" A matter of predator and prey to Umberto Lenzi, prepared with lingering views of critters slammed together (snake versus mongoose, jaguar versus monkey) and clinched with the arrival of the prospector (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) on the lam from the indios for being a coked-up scumbag. The ensuing vivisection and intestines-munching rather complicate the heroine's thesis. "Why couldn't we have made it Acapulco, instead of this poison paradise?" Lenzi's blunt studies in cruelty include a cut from a makeshift castration to a Salvation Army band back home and having the captive women warble "Red River Valley" before the sacrificial hussy gets acquainted with a pair of rusty hooks. Nevertheless, the most potent close-up has an American Express card held by indigenous hands, conquistador greed updated for the grindhouse '80s. The message? "Violence breeds violence," naturally, so the smarty-pants anthropologist sidesteps it and grabs her diploma, numbed by the spectacle. (The film's appropriation of Walkabout for the close might be its grandest butchery.) With Robert Kerman, Walter Lucchini, and Fiamma Maglione.
--- Fernando F. Croce |