17 posts categorized "Exploitation"

October 06, 2023

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST — SHOCKTOBER!

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ColeSmithey.comIn 1980, long before horror films like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Paranormal Activity" took up the "found-footage" trope, screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici and director Ruggero Deodato wrote the book on the subject with an exploitation horror film with a subtle name, "Cannibal Holocaust."

Deodato proved himself a master of guerrilla marketing by having his actors sign contracts agreeing not to appear in any type of media, to support rumors that "Cannibal Holocaust" was a snuff film for which the performers had actually perished.

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The filmmaker's ploy worked a little too well. Aside from grossing $2 million in the first 10 days of its release, the film was confiscated by Italian police in Milan. Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges, later amended to include an indictment for murder.

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Deodato avoided a life sentence after he proved the death sequences in the film were staged. Still, nothing could prevent censors in dozens of countries from banning the film outright. It took another three years before an edited version could be released in Italy. Years later the original uncut version was finally made available.

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The genus for the narrative grew out of a conversation Deodato had with his son about news coverage of the Red Brigades in Italy at the height of the leftist group's kidnappings and bank robberies. Deodato believed that some of the stories had been staged by media outlets to fulfill their agenda of editorial history-shaping.

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So it follows in the film that NYU professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) is part of a rescue team that discovers reels of lost footage taken by a group of four New York journalists searching for cannibal tribes in the Amazon basin — also referred to in the film as the "Green Inferno." The ragtag group of hippie reporters consist of a director (Carl Gabriel Yorke), his girlfriend assistant (Francesca Ciardi), and two cameramen.

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The rescue team’s discovery of a bug-infested human corpse precedes the film's first onscreen killing of an animal — a coatimundi that serves as the team's first jungle meal. Over the course of the film Deodato revels in the brutal murders of seven animals, including a monkey, pig, and giant tortoise. The gruesome animal deaths inform the tortures and murders of people that occur so that the viewer is immersed in an atmosphere of gory jungle hell.

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The story frequently returns to New York, where researchers carry on a cheesy objectifying discussion of the found footage and what it says about contrasting morals between civilized and uncivilized societies. Indeed, every terrible act of sexual and violent transgression committed by the Amazon cannibal natives is matched by the "professional" journalists who similarly stage the murderous acts they collect on film.

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Apart from being a truly disturbing film, "Cannibal Holocaust" serves up a cold plate of scathing social commentary. That it does so with a self-reflexive end run that encompasses the whole narrative context is a stroke of genius. However insane that genius might be, it perfectly mirrors the horrors of the extermination of indigenous cultures.

Not Rated. 95 mins.

4 Stars“ColeSmithey.com” Screen Shot 2023-10-05 at 12.33.50 PMCozy Cole

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April 26, 2022

BAD TIMING — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.comNicolas Roeg is at his most inventive in this suspenseful erotic psychological drama.

The visionary filmmaker behind “Performance,” “Walkabout,” “Don’t Look Now,” and “The Man Who Fell To Earth” reached his peak of cinematic daring with “Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession.”

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Art Garfunkel represents an unbalanced academic narcissist who exploits a romantic interlude with Milena, an ostensibly bi-polar adulterer (Theresa Russell) while visiting cold-war Vienna.

Jealousy and tortured distance are at the heart of the couple's dysfunctional relationship.

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Garfunkel's psychoanalyst Dr. Alex Linden would make an effective serial killer. Perhaps he's working up to it.

"Bad Timing" is twisted, in a good way.

Love, romance, and sex are overrated. 

Rated R. 123 mins.

5 Stars ColeSmithey.com

Episode #92 — Brooklyn artist Valleire Trachsler came on the show to talk about one of Isabelle Huppert's favorite films included in the Criterion Collection, Nicolas Roeg's BAD TIMING: A SENSUAL OBSESSION.

Bon appétit!

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Cozy Cole

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October 20, 2018

LET THE CORPSES TAN

    ColeSmithey.com    Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Welcome!

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

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ColeSmithey.comThe narrative is appropriately thin in this wildly inspired homage to European crime action movie tropes of the ’70 (think “Zabriskie Point”). As a result, “Let the Corpses Tan” plays better as a retro art instillation piece or as a film you could project on a giant party screen for revelers to get wasted as they engage in all types of sexual misconduct.

Nonetheless, Belgian writing/directing duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (“The Strange Color of You”) wring a lot of movie out of their “genre” (low budget) exploration.

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Although it sports one of the most incendiary film titles in recent memory, “Let the Corpses Tan” is too one-note to hold your interest for its 92 minutes regardless of how much fetishistic attention is paid to every gritty detail involving a stand-off between gangsters in a remote dusty seaside location.

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The filmmakers revel in playing tricks with your eyes as when, what seems to be, an overhead shot of the location’s compound is overrun with [seemingly giant] ants. Sure it’s all style with not much substance but that’s the point. If you’re in the mood for virtuosic visual panache involving machine guns, gold, cars, motorcycles, fire, smoke, and blood, then you’re in business.   

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Not Rated. 92 mins. Three Stars

Cozy Cole

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