MC
Marco Castellini
•A group of young people, consisting of photographers and adventurers, decide to go to the Amazon to shoot a documentary about an indigenous tribe of cannibals. Upon arriving at the location, they realize that the indigenous people are not as dangerous as they thought, but rather have become peaceful and abandoned the practices of cannibalism. To still make their documentary, they attempt to incite violence among the tribe members, committing atrocities against their women and livestock; they will succeed but will face terrible consequences…
The quintessential cannibal movie, the scandal film of the seventies, which earned fame and harsh criticism for director Ruggero Deodato. Surprisingly well acted (given the poor level of acting to which we have become accustomed by genre films of the period) and excellently scored by Riz Ortolani, the film in question is worth watching for several reasons. Firstly, because it is the film that, with its success, opened the way to a genre, the cannibal movies, quite important in Italian genre cinema; then for the excellent realization of the splatter sequences (some of which are truly memorable) among the best ever made in Italy.
Even though the reason why everyone remembers this film by Deodato is another, namely the presence of some snuff sequences. It is indeed one of the few films where it has been established that some sequences (they are mostly scenes where some animals are killed and tortured) do not represent a "cinematic fiction," but are real. Lamberto Bava, who played the role of assistant director, left the set after the first shots because he was shocked by this situation, and most of the actors, including "the irreproachable" Luca Barbareschi, are still ashamed today of having made this film. The film, highly deplorable from a moral point of view, inevitably attracts the most morbid fantasies of the spectator and for this reason has become a "cult" of the genre. Its viewing is recommended only to a "mature" audience.
