• Wide Release
• Director: Ruggero Deodato
• Written by: Gianfranco Clerici
• Running Time: 95 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating:
• Cast: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi, Salvatore Basile, Ricardo Fuentes, Carl Gabriel Yorke

This movie not only has the dubious virtue of being the first movie I ever reviewed online (way back when I started my Chim's Underground Video and Cult Horror Film Site), but it also has the distinction of being the first video I ever ordered online. This was way back in the VHS days when this movie was a rarity. I purchased my copy from VIDEO MAYHEM, which was, at the time, one of the best and most well known sites for ordering dup copies of rare, out-of-print and foriegn import movies. Don't bother searching for it, it's not there anymore. Most of the sites I used to order from back in the VHS days, Video Mayhem, Blackest Heart Cinema, Midnight Video, are no longer with us. The DVD revolution and all the releases of old titles on DVD, as well as the coming of P2P file sharing and broadband Internet connections put the damper on the need for such sites. Still though, there are sites still out there. One of the best still around and one I use often enough is The Trash Palace. But enough about the questionable places I haunt for movies, let's get on with the review.

If you have never heard of this movie, you have prolly been living under a rock, or else are so far gone wrapped up in the mainstream Hollywood entertainment that you must have stumbled on this page by complete accident while searching for 'Twilight'. In either case, for those of you who do not know, this is THE MOVIE, probablely the most nortorious bit of cinema in the entire world. It has been banned in more countries than most any other film. Within weeks of it's release in Italy, the director was arrested and charged with not only obscenity, but with murder and faced life imprisionment were it not for the fact that he was able to present the actors to the courts. Such was the realism of this film, that the police actually thought the actors were really killed. The BLAIR WITCH PROJECT didn't even get this reaction and that's what it was shooting for.  The story concerns three film makers who head into the Amazon region to film the natives and such. They are never seen again and so this other guy goes in to find out what happened. He eventually finds their film cans and returns to watch them. The film cans contain footage of the film makers little escapades and hidious fate. It seems they were a bunch of psychotics with very bad public relation skills with the natives (One says, "yeah, if I shoot one them, it'll slow them enough so we can follow them to their village"). I mean, not even the turtles are safe from this bunch of nuts. Eventually, the natives get enough and massacre them in a most brutal fashion.  There is lots of naked natives and some real EXTREME brutal gore, some is even real as the aforementioned turtle incident. And these native, man do they know how to treat cheating wives!!! I'm not saying I agree with it, but trust me it works, they never cheat again...

As I mentioned, this movie was banned in many countries, including Italy and England, but this was due to the animal cruelty (which was real) rather than any scenes of human violence. Although there is some real human violence in this which was documentary footage supposedly from Nigeria and South East Asia included in "The Last Road To Hell", one of the films-within-the-film, this was cut out in many releases, along with most of the animal violence in many releases. The number of countries that have 'banned' this has been inflated because these releases are not all banned, so technically the 'banned' just applied to the uncut version.

This movie really appeals to the shock-and-awe crowd of gorehounds who like it brutal and blood drenched and rape-filled and ultra-violent. And certainly it should, but if you watch it and get past that stuff, Deodato actually has a few legitimate points to make about human nature and society. Sure they are ugly points, but they have the ring of truth to them. It was very ironic about his arrest and subsequently having to prove he didn't actually have anyone killed. One of the ideas basic to the story is that reporters sometimes go out of their way to encourage the news to happen a certain way, a violent sensational way to grab audiences.

Visually this movie is stunning. The soundtrack, although dated, is something else too (and has been 'borrowed' a lot in other movies, so it may sound familiar). Much of it was shot on location in the Amazon and there is some amazing, but mostly violent, wild life photography. And here is your Trailer: