Cannibal Stock Footage

Using stock footage and letting it appear in the final editing of any full length, commercially released feature is kinda lame. Not only is this lame because it suggests that you didn't have the budget, time or imagination to shoot the scenes yourself, it's also lame because you're assuming the viewer is an idiot who will not see the difference in grain or film stock used.

However, an industry litterally lived on stock footage in Europe, in the 70's and 80's. A practice that was seldom used before almost became a norm, with italian genre filmmakers, and for the fine folks at the Eurociné offices, in Paris, it was mandatory.

Eurociné were a phenomenon : they had a whole catalogue of action scenes, and with their economical ingeniosity, they could write a script around a whole hour of stock footage and then have to shoot only half an hour to get to the 90 minutes mark. Even with only 30 minutes to shoot, they would try to cut down costs by avoiding to pay for "interns" part of their crews, or doing everything "on the cheap"; their productions reflect these choices, unfortunately, and this "cheapness" has become their trademark over the years.

Italian genre filmmakers used the "technique", more often than not, as a valuable shock value. Especially in cannibal movies, a current started by Umberto Lenzi's MAN FROM DEEP RIVER and whose most remarkable pieces included Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and Lenzi's own CANNIBAL FEROX. These movies are all fun, all action, all shockers.



When I worked in a Laval Club International Vidéofilm, some years ago, there wasn't a week passing by without somebody asking about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. Modern legend has it that the "found footage" featured as the main plot twist of the film is real. Which, of course, is not the case. Ruggero Deodato knows the story well, because he's heard it all his life. When I met him in Tarrytown, NY, at his CultCon appearance a few years back, he mentioned that the thing for which he was blamed the most was the animal massacres. In EATEN ALIVE, another Lenzi flick that I watched yesterday, the shock value of animal killings is taken to an extreme. The scenes are pointlessly incorporated in the action, probably suggesting that the jungle out there is a deadly and savage place you wouldn't want to visit anytime soon.



It's just horrifying on another level : the biggest shock is that a film crew could stand there and capture pure barbary for the sake of "entertainment". I'm not a born-again christian or buddhist who believes every life has the same value, but common sense drives me to think that killing animals "just for fun" - because that's what it is, after all - is reprehensible.

In EATEN ALIVE, I don't know what parts of this nonsense were shot by Lenzi and what parts where stock footage. Even though it does not interfere with the way we perceive the movie and our appreciation of old Umberto's sense of pace and witty one-liners, it's not a pleasing experience to have to see that, and it's the kind of "exploitation" that gives the genre a bad name.



It's still a fascinating subgenre from an era where a lot more was permitted, and watching it is like staring at a Monet painting in a dusty museum; it is the transposition of sensationalism onscreen, as seen by an italian artisan, with Ivan Rassimov, Janet Agren and Paola Senatore. Which is something I, personally, cannot say no to !