Cannibal Holocaust screens in the Odeon Covent Garden Thurs 26th COURTESY OF SHAMELESS SCREEN ENTERTAINMENT. Full details of this and all the events happening at the Cine-Excess festival in our previous post.

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Cine-Excess are screening Shameless Screen Entertainment’s new version of Cannibal Holocaust. Catch up with all the latest news on the upcoming release and join in the discussion on the official forum

Cine Excess is a great event because it treats movies that seldom receive the praise they deserve with the kind of critical thumbs-up usually reserved for more high-brow efforts. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is a great example of this. Vilified and banned throughout the world, Deodato’s legendary exercise in dubious taste and morals is still a unique and influential movie that plays with the genre format to produce a work that’s far more than a gutmunching endurance test.

Critics have pointed out the movie is a major influence on modern horror and that it’s film-within-film plot device elevates the work above more run-of-the-mill Green Hell adventures like Cannibal Ferox.

In agree wholeheartedly that even the very worst, most excessive and apparently morally damaging movies from the classic Video Nasty era need reappraisal but if I’m being totally honest, smart directorial choices and a retrospective application of the word art weren’t high on my list of cinematic necessities as a 14 year old metal kid with a hunger of splatter.

When the nth generation copies picked up at the local comic book convention started finding their way around the schoolyard, the film’s message of ‘who are the real savages?’ was far from our minds… We all just wanted to know how they managed to impale the woman on the river bank so the stake came out of her mouth. The static fizz and flutter of the much distressed picture and the muddy, faded audio added to the verite of the experience and helped to sell the gore effects. In the race for ever improved home entertainment formats, it’s sometimes worth remembering that Blu-ray can occasionally reveal a badly executed disembowelling that would have played just fine through a snowstorm of magnetic distortion.

Cannibal Holocaust was THE title that you hoped the dodgy guy at the video store who kept all the banned tapes out the back of the shop would have in stock when you bunked off school with an uninitiated friend. With curtains drawn against the sun to avoid the ugly glare and reflections that plagued old fashioned fishbowl-like TVs, sitting down with a newbie to watch Deodato’s riot of disgust and misanthrophy was a rare joy which gave me a love of extreme cinematic violence, Lynn drum pads and Italian ‘trash’ cinema that’s lasted to this day.

In a weird way, I’d like to thank the moral crusaders who so bravely fought to keep this kind of filth away from our vunerable eyes. Thank you viewers and listeners for creating a cult, a subculture, a movement, whatever you want to call it. Please don’t misinterpret me. I hold censorship in the same contempt as I do any other form of repression, but life rolls along better if you grab at the positives and let’s face it, banning and cutting these movies gave them the kudos to exist and to be of influence long after their expected sell by dates. By banning them, traditional upholders of moral virture created a shopping list of fun and frolics while at the same injecting an illicit thrill into the whole proceedings.

I liked knowing I was an evil criminal and an enemy of right thinking people every time I duped a copy of Cannibal Holocaust for a friend. Thankfully, these days we can enjoy the film without harrassment or the disapproving glance of others so illegal distribution is unnecessary but back then, if the state said you couldn’t own a movie for fear of warping your senses beyond repair, what choice did you have but to pirate the material? These films never disappeared from the underground, the word of mouth nature of copies begatting copies kept these banned works alive and in front of an audience, albeit in a much diminished and fuzzed up form until the establishment caught up with the times and allowed legal distribution once again.

None of the above is in any way meant to imply that I don’t think Cannibal Holocaust doesn’t deserve the critical reappraisal that the movie has garnered in recent years, merely that the reasons I was first attracted to the film in my teens are radically different from the reasons that I now admire the movie. Next Thursday, when the directors new edit is revealed at the Cine-Excess Festival, it’ll be time once again to revisit a film that, throughout my adult life, has exerted a powerful hold on my imagination. Will it suck me in to it’s twisted world again? Yes. Will it confound and disgust me in a disconcertingly exhilarating way? Almost certainly. Will I get off on the sheer spite and venom of the flick? Probably less so than in younger years. Maybe I’m a little less callous now I’m older… Sam@cultlabs