Cannibal Holocaust: Ruggero Deodato's New Edit [DVD]

This is worth the hype in every way, a fantastic looking film for the 70's, very shocking and very controversial!! The violence towards the humans is all very realistic and its very hard to see what is not real, the animal cruelty is quite harsh and may offend people, the story is good, great surroundings and locations and the music score is awesome!! This is classic stuff, you must see the U.S uncut version as all U.K versions are very trimmed sorry!!

Firstly, hats off to Shameless for another great release. A lot of frustration has always surrounded distributors of this film - remember that ANY company would want to put this out in it's original UNCUT state, and whilst minor scene(s) have been tweaked this version is still cut. Why, in today's society do we have to have moral guardians at the BBFC who decide what we can and cannot watch is beyond me. Imagine the poor people who were prosecuted back in the 1980's for a version of this film that was cut by 6 minutes, only to find years later it's re-released with seconds cut!!! Quite amazing and ridiculous - probably that fact is more disturbing than the film itself. Absolute lunacy! Talk about nanny state!

Anyhow, enough of the moral highground. Cannibal Holocaust was and remains to this day one of the most distrubing films of all time. Period. It is a fascinating piece of cinema that touches emotions like no other film I've ever seen. From the haunting meoldies of Riz Ortalandi's musical score (which is fantastic throughout) to the final scenes of death, this film IS the mother of all movies. But what makes it so? Is it the violence? The animal creulty? The layered context of mixed messages about society? Well, maybe. The violence when it comes is pure exploitation on a upper class level. This is not glorified violence as in Umberto Lenzi's 'Cannibal Ferox', but more shocking, twisted and downright depraved.

There really is not much more to add, except watch it and prepare to be amazed. This is a film you will NOT forget.

Well I suppose any release of this will cause debate. To sum up the film, despite the very unfortunate animal cruelty (though in the real world far worse goes on with animals and no one bats an eyelid), this is an amazing, unique and genuinely horrifying film, which I highly recommend.

Regarding this release, as Arrow Video have done with their releases of cult films Shameless have really done this justice and presented it well. So far I have only seen the director-approved edited version. The restored quality is brilliant, it looks and sounds great, so much so that to make the found footage part which was supposed to look inferior they altered and messed up in the odd frame to make it look more convincing. Because they have done this the edits of the animal cruelty scenes look a lot less out of place and more natural than I feared they would. Though Ruggero's reason for doing this seems to be more 'it's just too much for the viewer' than 'it was wrong to do that to the animals', though it can't be undone I don't need to see the snuff footage so I am glad they managed to edit and obscure it convincingly...

Regarding the whole film that seems to be about all that was edited, so unless you are desperate enough to see the animal cruelty to complain about it still (in which case I am concerned for your health), I don't see what the big deal is...

The extras and interviews are really good too, some amusing comments from Ruggero (particularly regarding Robert Kerman).

So overall a version of this masterpiece I highly recommend others to buy