“I’m so glad this film is in the Venice Classics section, because it’s not the kind of movie my mom would call a classic. We live in a very safe age, and we need unsafe movies. This one is very unsafe.”
These were the words of Nicolas Winding Refn introducing the midnight screening of 1977’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (known as Jungle Holocaust in English), one of the most anticipated in this year’s Venice lineup of restored gems (this writer had to wait for three days before a few seats freed up in the not-so-big Sala Giardino).
The Danish filmmaker has been a frequent guest of the festival in recent years when it comes to restorations of genre films, sometimes being actively involved in bringing certain titles back into the limelight.
Sadly absent was the film’s director Ruggero Deodato, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 83 and would have loved the dual resurgence of two of his most infamous films: his follow-up to Ultimo mondo cannibale, 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, was recently re-released in Italian cinemas, and is receiving a new 4K home release this month, with the cover proudly proclaiming the movie was censored and/or banned in a couple dozen countries. To this day, it still can’t be viewed uncut in certain territories, including the UK, where a 2011 reappraisal by the British Board of Film Classification led to most of the previous deletions being waived (the BBFC admitted its previous ruling was more in response to the film’s disgusting nature than to actual breaches of their guidelines), save for one prolonged sequence of animal cruelty.
The latter remains the most controversial aspect of Deodato’s career, one he himself openly acknowledged in subsequent interviews and festival appearances, showing a remarkable maturity regarding his work’s ethical shortcomings. His cannibal movies, like many Italian exploitation films of the time, feature scenes where real animals were killed on camera (usually, but not always, in one take), with the official justification that local residents hired to play the man-eaters would have consumed them anyway.
Ironically, what really got him in trouble with Cannibal Holocaust (which also exists in a version completely devoid of animal cruelty, approved by the director) was the accusation that he had murdered his cast. Facing criminal charges, he had to get Luca Barbareschi – the sole actor he was still in touch with – to convince the other actors to show up and clear his name, since they had originally agreed to stay out of the public eye for a whole year to add to the film’s found footage component.
He then whole-heartedly embraced the image of himself that had come to be associated with the genre. In 2007, he cameoed in Hostel: Part II (whose director Eli Roth is a huge fan of Deodato’s work) as an Italian gentleman whose chosen method of torture-murder at the Elite Hunting complex in Slovakia is to eat his victims.
Ultimo mondo cannibale is basically a test run for its much more notorious successor, a more impersonal rough draft that Deodato inherited from fellow horror filmmaker Umberto Lenzi, who had turned down the gig. Viewed today, the only scene that truly shocks is the one where a crocodile is gutted, in close-up, for almost two minutes (not surprisingly, it’s absent in most international edits), and predictably it was the one moment that caused walkouts at the midnight screening. Other scenes, such as the one where a local woman feeds her baby to another crocodile literally seconds after giving birth, come across as comical.
And it’s truly a shame that Deodato – represented at the screening by his two adult children – could not enjoy the audience’s reaction. A great raconteur, “Monsieur Cannibale”, as he was known in France,
would undoubtedly have made the night even more memorable with his colorful embellishments and riveting anecdotes about a bygone era, one that let him get away with some things he later regretted.