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I say this having watched Threads four days ago: this is the bleakest shit I've seen in my life. Wild how you could be forgiven for assuming the events depicted are a Kafkaesque parable for existence under capitalism only to learn NOPE TOTALLY A THING THAT HAPPENED.

Fonda's incredible—heading right from this into Klute is a hell of a streak.

Was not prepared for how viscerally this was going to make me want to murder a kid.

Pushes the Hays envelope as far as it can to depict the destruction homophobia wreaks on the lives of two closeted lesbians when they're outed by a vindictive child's half truths. As an artifact of its time it is by nature imperfect, but the level of sensitivity and nuance a picture made in 1961 could have toward these women is still really surprising. Incredibly difficult to watch but I'm glad I did.

Also, speaking of lesbians . . . my god, that we were blessed by Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn sharing the screen. My god.

Any moral or ideological point this film attempts to make is negated by its own existence.

The wanton slaughter of live animals is the most visceral of the hypocrisies on display here, but it's far from the only one. Actors were coerced into sex scenes they didn't wish to perform, and by their own account suffered lasting psychological damage. Native extras were held inside a burning hut and then paid nothing. Cannibal Holocaust looks at these acts committed in its name, shakes its head, and says, "Boy, any society that could perpetrate these evils just to make a movie must be monstrous, huh?"

Beyond the scope of the direct harm committed in order for the filmmakers to chide themselves, the film also dehumanizes and brutalizes the people groups it claims to be defending. The indigenous peoples depicted in Cannibal Holocaust are props for degradation—raped, maimed, and discarded in loving detail. Not content to torture them, the film also villainizes them. Its ultimate message is that its white colonizer characters are no better than its indigenous characters—the colonizers' crime is sinking to the level of rape and sadism that the indigenous peoples practice. Not only is this founded on a lie—there is no war between the two tribes used as the film's basis, and they do not practice cannibalism outside of funeral rites—it places the onus of evil back on the so-called "primitives." Colonization's ultimate sin, this school of thought insists, is that it reverts "civilized" Western man back to his savage roots—that it could be its own unique, far more malevolent kind of evil is never considered.

What, then, is the utility of the movie? I doubt there's a single person on earth who prior to watching Cannibal Holocaust did not realize imperialism was bad only to have the film open their eyes. And to convey that message, it practiced by necessity the very same tactics it condemns. Cannibal Holocaust's ultimate thesis is that its own existence is an evil—that films like this should not be permitted to be made, and that any purpose they could serve is outweighed by the evil required to bring them about. I will do it the credit of taking it at its word.