Nackt und zerfleischt (1980)

Nackt und zerfleischt: Directed by Ruggero Deodato. With Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi. During a rescue mission into the Amazon rainforest, a professor stumbles across lost film shot by a missing documentary crew.

“The second word in the title is important. Ruggero Deodatou0026#39;s 1979 meta-snuff movie, far more than a chichi trinket like THE NIGHT PORTER, is the real Holocaust porn. Here the trigger is not frights, or even shocks, or even splatter. Atrocity is the name of Deodatou0026#39;s game–and the genius of this monsterpiece is that Deodato horrifyingly delivers the goods at the same time he coruscates his audience and himself.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThis is a hard movie to recommend to any but those who would find it anyway; but it must be said that Deodato here created the most rigorous, critical, almost philosophical movie in the Italian horror canon. The audienceu0026#39;s lust for Third World exoticism and envelope-pushing violence are gratified and held up to the painful light of day–and not necessarily in that order. The overwhelming feeling of this picture is of a pornographer pleading, u0026quot;Stop me before I shoot again.u0026quot;u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe conceit of the movie–an academicu0026#39;s journey into the Amazon to find the remains of a Western film crew devoured by cannibals–permits Deodato more Pirandellian boxes within boxes than a double bill of BLOWUP and THE PLAYER. But the atmosphere of the movie, despite scenes of cruelty so extreme you sometimes want to put out your eyeballs, is relentlessly elegiac–capped by Riz Ortolaniu0026#39;s theme music. (It can be said with certainty that no romantic ballad was ever used underneath what Deodato stages here.)u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eCANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is the farthest edge of Extreme Cinema–as in Extreme Sports. It feels stuntlike, yet the combination of amplified bloodlust and world-weary regret is unique. Like Lucio Fulciu0026#39;s even more personal CAT IN THE BRAIN, itu0026#39;s an affecting enactment of an exploitation artistu0026#39;s conscience tearing apart.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIt might make good viewing for Y2K Eve: it puts together the centuryu0026#39;s two salient words–holocaust and entertainment–as no other film did before or since.”