"So brutal, ruthless, cruel, vicious, fierce, pitiless, heartless and inhuman!"

Last night I watched the obscene, titillating, reality-warping, meta-journalistic, stunning, and horrible, in every sense of the word horrible, movie, Cannibal Holocaust--all by myself. Like a moth repeatedly burned by the lightbulb of 1970’s Italian horror cinema, that insane experience drove me to frantically parse the Google Blog Search results for Cannibal Holocaust last night, just so I wouldn’t feel so dirty.

Cannibal Holocaust is a fictional movie about unreleased footage taken by four filmmakers who died while making an Amazon documentary. The Blair Witch Project’s robbery of this premise aside, these meta-layers buried a Heart of Darkness scenario that I never in a million years expected from this bloody chunk of grindhouse cinema -- it’s a phony National Geographic snuff film that intentionally makes you feel like a Terrible Human Being for watching the movie.

This wonderful post at Thought Peach sums up the contradictory feeling of accomplishment and self-loathing that I felt when I finished this infamous grindhouse classic my buddy Justin gave me for Christmas. I stopped reading blog posts after I found this masterpiece of cinematic commentary on 16-year-old Sheena Valencia's site: “On the first half we had Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Cannibal Holocaust! Charlie was cute and the latter film was so brutal, ruthless, cruel, vicious, fierce, pitiless, heartless and inhuman!”

God bless the Internet for bringing together thousands of hapless teenagers and horror fans and nutcases and people like me who all inexplicably decided to watch this movie during the holiday season. May we all go blind together...

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