I'm not altogether sure how to write about this film - I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. We're into hard core video nasty territory here, and it's difficult to know exactly how to review a film that fits so firmly into one of the least reputable film sub-cultures of all time.

This film was one of many exploitative horror movies that were banned in the UK in the mid-80s. A bit of history for you: before the 1985 video recordings act it was legal to release on video anything that the distributors could get their grubby little hands on. In the early 80s the big film studios didn't release films on video, so video companies had to sift through the dregs of cheap cinema in order to meet the public demand for videos to rent/buy. And so the video nasty scare was born - one thing that there was no shortage of was cheap, schlocky horror movies, mostly from Europe. For a year or two British video owners were able to "enjoy" the most depraved and filthy horror movies in the world. Then the tabloids whipped up a frenzy of "think of the children" paranoia and the government clamped down, handing control of video censorship to the ultra-conservative BBFC, which promptly banned all the nasties.

Most of these banned films have since been re-released, often uncut, as many of them were pretty innocuous. In recent years we've seen the uncut release of most of the important banned films (Salo, Straw Dogs etc). Several of the nasties remain unreleased (at least uncut) in the UK. But most of the major censorship battles have been won, and very few people are willing to campaign for the release of the remaining nasties, which are generally seen as either morally repulsive or too trivial to bother about. Which is fair enough, as the worst offenders are pretty loathsome, exhibiting a strain of misogyny that makes me deeply uneasy. They're also, for the most part, extremely bad, those that I've seen; there are no cinema tic gems waiting to be rediscovered. No one's missing anything by not being allowed to see Island Of Death in all its uncut glory.

Cannibal Holocaust is often described as different to other video nasties, at least by people who regard such things with sympathy. It is, they argue, a powerful and important piece of work that deserves wider exposure, and presumably should be allowed to take its place alongside the work of Fellini or Visconti as amongst the best that Italian cinema has to offer. Um, I can't really agree with that.

Spoilers ahead. It really doesn't matter - no one watches video nasties for the plot.

The film begins with a professor of anthropology going into the South American jungles to search for a team of missing documentary makers (three men and one woman). They were filming the savage cannibal tribes of the region, and the professor fears that they've come to a sticky end. He's absolutely right: pretty soon he finds their remains, and leaves the jungle clutching the cans of film that they shot before they died. He returns to civilisation and watches their footage to find out exactly what became of them (this being the main part of the film).

It certainly is a deeply horrifying film. The pretty despicable film-maker characters witness, instigate or suffer acts of murder, mutilation, extreme animal cruelty and rape. Strong stuff. The film seems to be peddling a very obvious message - these Westerners are just as bad as, if not worse than, the cannibal tribe they're filming. The film tries to say "Look! Look how dreadful these people are! They're going around doing all this bad stuff, all in the name of making an exploitation documentary! And you're watching it! How awful!" But the film does insist on showing in often excruciating detail all the things that it pretends to condemn. If director Ruggero Deodato and his collaborators really disapproved of murdering animals for entertainment then they wouldn't do it, would they? The film seems to be trying to comment on the unpleasant excesses of Italian exploitation films by being the most exploitative of them all. It seems to be trying to make the audience question their desire to see these kinds of images, but gives them the images in all their sordid glory anyway. I don't think that quite works.

The film isn't really pretending to condemn anything. Another quick history lesson. Bear with me. In the 60s and 70s the "Mondo" film became popular in Italy. These films were "documentaries" in which all the wild wonders of tribal life in the Third World were put on display for the disbelieving Western viewer. They were basically an excuse to show topless tribeswomen, but could also be relied on to show plenty of animals killing each other along with faked tribal sacrifices and real life war footage. Pretty nasty. Out of these films grew the cannibal film, a squalid little horror sub-genre, of which Cannibal Holocaust is both the zenith and the nadir. There was apparently a certain amount of one-upmanship amongst the cannibal directors, who would try and outdo their rivals in terms of visceral nastiness. I find it far likelier that Cannibal Holocaust was really just an attempt to out-nasty all the other cannibal films while making sly nods towards the genre's mondo origins, rather than a scathing attack on mindset behind the genre.

So anyway, and I'm sorry if this is starting to spiral out of control, back to the film. The good stuff first. The documentary footage shot by the film-maker characters is extremely well done. Because it looks so cheap, because it's filmed with wobbly hand-held cameras, it somehow looks infinitely more convincing than it would if higher tech equipment had been used. The actors are not familiar from other films, and their apparent deaths at the film's conclusion led many people to believe that they'd witnessed a genuine snuff movie. (I've actually had the plot of Cannibal Holocaust described to me as a true story - film becomes urban myth - weird.)

That's the good thing about the film. Now we come to the bad stuff. The thing that everyone has problems with is the animal murder. We get to see various monkeys, pigs, snakes etc killed, live, on screen, in unflinching detail. The most gruelling is an unfortunate turtle that is pulled from the river, decapitated and then dismembered. This is horrible, it's unnecessary, and the casual hey-it's-no-big-deal-we're-just-killing-a-turtle attitude is deeply shocking. These scenes will never be passed uncut in this country as they contravene animal cruelty laws. (Although Apocalypse Now somehow gets away with it; maybe if Deodato had made an interminable, pretentious film about Vietnam he'd have been OK.)

Although the animal deaths are really nasty, the sexual violence is far more disturbing. There's one woman in the group of film-makers. Her main contribution to the film is to get naked a lot. At the end she is brutally raped and killed by the cannibals. While the male characters all thoroughly deserve their nasty deaths, she doesn't at all; she's the one decent human being in the film. And yet it's her rape/murder that forms the centrepiece of the film's gruesome climax. Given that we'd seen her naked so many times earlier in the film I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that we're supposed to find the rape scene at least mildly titillating. Which, to put it mildly, is wrong on every imaginable level.

The film's final scene is ludicrous. The professor, having watched the film-within-a-film, emerges into the big city, looks around, and thinks to himself "I wonder who the real cannibals are?" Like, yeah man. I get the feeling that absurdly weak punch line is somehow supposed to justify the rest of the film. Sorry, no. This is a nasty little film and no mistake.

And yet I still feel compelled to write about it. And I still found myself watching it again recently. There is a certain fascination about a film that's willing to go as far as this one does. It lurches from one extreme moment to the next, with little in between (which is the whole purpose of this kind of film, of course). And it is horrifying, and what are horror films for if not to horrify? (One of the more disturbing - and interesting - things about Cannibal Holocaust and its ilk is that there was obviously a strong demand for them. I can't begin to explain why, but I'd be interested in any theories.)

I don't feel that I can defend Cannibal Holocaust, and nor do I want to - it's nasty, it's ugly, it's shockingly casual about horrible things - but on the other hand I can't quite bring myself to give it the wholehearted condemnation it likely deserves. While horror films on the whole are becoming more and more cosy and irrelevant it's almost refreshing to occasionally step over the line into the grimy world of true exploitation schlock. Cannibal Holocaust is perhaps the only video nasty that's made well enough to be watched seriously, which could be why it's actually disturbing. These kinds of films are generally very low-budget and extremely unconvincing, so I can normally just laugh at gory incidents, or shrug them off as the offensive fantasies of perverted directors. Cannibal Holocaust didn't let me do either. I won't recommend this film to anyone - it's morally indefensible - but it certainly made an impact on me.

It's only available in a cut version in this country. As I understand it the animal deaths and rape scenes have been removed. It seems a bit pointless watching a video nasty with the nasty bits cut out, but I guess it might still retain some of its sordid atmosphere. A thoroughly unpleasant film, but having seen it I can't forget it.

Featured is the original banned uk pre cert sleeve from Go Video.