Cannibal Holocaust

In the Amazon, an anthropologist discovers the bodies of a lost documentary film crew. Their footage, which makes up the majority of Cannibal Holocaust, tells of the hubris and cruelty of the so-called civilised, who sensationally and disrespectfully invade the pristine natural landscape and are ultimately destroyed and exterminated by the tribal community living there. Deodato's scandalous film is as primitive as it is visionary, simultaneously an indictment of media spectacles of violence and their apotheosis, and in any case still a hard-to-digest big bang of the found-footage horror film that only fully blossomed two decades later. (mk)