I don’t even know how I came across this nominally biographical documentary, and in fact more of a film about the cult Italian director made by some of his Brazilian fans. A few years ago, as far as I understood, Ruggero Deodato arrived in Brazil for a horror film festival, and a certain Felipe Guerra, a Brazilian horror director who had previously made a similar documentary about another Italian filmmaker, took the opportunity to film an interview with him. in underground circles, Luigi Cozzi. Still, Deodato is a far, far bigger face than Cozzi, and as the very title of this documentary suggests, Guerra was most interested in his most famous and notorious film, “Cannibal Holocaust”.
But it’s not just a documentary about making one of the most controversial and brutal films of all time, but about Deodat’s career in general. So Deodato sits in a movie theater and talks about his career. How he ended up in the film in general, mostly thanks to the fact that he was a friend of the son of the famous Robert Rosselini and started as his assistant director. For years, he was a sought-after assistant, and worked with many other famous filmmakers, such as Sergio Corbucci, to whom, he claims, he recommended the then anonymous Francesco Sparaner and Franco Nero. So he soon got a director and he shot really everything until the cult film from 1980. From violets, horror, exploitation films, those typical Italian films about ancient heroes, fantasies, crime stories in which they tried to copy the then popular American films in a rather third way.
Thus, in the late 1970s, he was given the opportunity to make an exploitative film about cannibals in the Philippines, “Last Cannibal World”, which caused controversy due to cruelty and violence, but it was nothing compared to “Cannibal Holocaust”. Because of that film, he points out, he was sentenced to four months of suspended imprisonment, and the whole circus was created because this extremely brutal exploitative horror was advertised as a documentary. This film can also be considered the originator of the horror subgenre called Found Footage, which appears to be a documentary, and this subgenre was revived twenty years later by “The Blair Witch”. And apparently Deodato did the job so well that even before the film hit Italian cinemas he was arrested on suspicion of killing members of the cast as the film seemed terribly authentic and real.
The situation went so far that he had to bring the actors from the film to court to show that they were alive and that he did not kill them during the filming, but he was still banned from making films for several years. In this documentary, Deodato also talks about his later career, about the films he made during the eighties and nineties in which he adhered to previous postulates. Although Deodato never managed to make high-quality and high-quality films, but mostly kept to exploitation, he built a following over the years, with Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, who made a horror film a few years ago. “The Green Inferno,” a horror set in the Amazon rainforest and among the Amazon cannibals that is an obvious homage to Deodatus and his cult horror. Rating 6.5 / 10.
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