Cannibal Holocaust

In 1979, an American film crew — director Alan Yates, script supervisor Faye Daniels, cameramen Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso, and native guide Felipe — disappear into the Amazon rainforest while filming The Green Inferno, a documentary about indigenous cannibal tribes. Harold Monroe, an anthropologist at NYU, agrees to lead a rescue mission for the missing filmmakers. Before his arrival, military personnel stationed in the rainforest conduct a raid on the local Yacumo tribe and take a young man hostage to negotiate with the natives. Monroe flies in via floatplane and meets his guides, Chaco and Miguel. While trekking through the jungle, they find Felipe's skeleton and Chaco force-feeds the hostage cocaine to keep him pliable. They secretly watch a native man murder a woman as punishment for adultery; Chaco forbids Monroe to intervene. The team follows the man to a group of Yacumo and promises to release their hostage in exchange for being taken to the Yacumo village. Once there, the group is greeted with hostility and learns that the filmmakers caused great unrest among the people. The next day, Monroe and his guides head deeper into the rainforest to locate two warring endocannibal tribes, the Ya̧nomamö and the Shamatari. They follow a group of Shamatari warriors to a riverbank, where Monroe's team saves a smaller group of Ya̧nomamö from death. The Ya̧nomamö invite the team back to their village in gratitude but remain suspicious of the foreigners. Monroe bathes naked in a river to gain their trust, where a group of Ya̧nomamö women joins him. The woman leads Monroe from the river to a shrine, where he discovers the filmmakers' skeletal remains and their film reels. He later plays music from a tape recorder for the Ya̧nomamö in the village, hoping they will trade it for the film reels; the natives are intrigued and agree. Monroe returns to NYC, where Pan American Broadcasting System executives invite him to host a documentary broadcast based on the recovered film. Monroe insists on viewing the raw footage before agreeing. One of the executives introduces him to Alan's work by showing an excerpt from his previous documentary, The Last Road to Hell, after which she informs Monroe that Alan staged dramatic scenes to make his films more exciting. Monroe begins to view the recovered footage, which follows the group's journey through the rainforest. After walking for days, Felipe is bitten by a venomous snake. They amputate his leg with a machete to save him, but he dies and is left behind. Upon locating the Yacumo in a clearing, Jack shoots one in the leg so they can easily follow him to the village. Once they arrive, the crew proceeds to intimidate the tribe and kill a child's pet pig before herding the natives into a hut, which they burn down to stage a massacre for their film. Monroe expresses apprehension about the staged footage and the treatment of the natives, but his concerns are ignored. After viewing the remaining footage, Monroe is disgusted by the station's decision to air the documentary and shows the executives the unedited footage he alone has seen to convince them otherwise. The final two reels begin with the filmmakers gang-raping a Ya̧nomamö girl against Faye's protests, silently watched from afar by a Ya̧nomamö man. They later encounter the same girl impaled on a wooden pole by a riverbank, where they claim that the natives killed her for her loss of virginity before marriage. Shortly afterward, they are vengefully attacked by the Ya̧nomamö tribe. A spear hits Jack, and Alan shoots him to prevent his escape. The natives begin undressing Jack's lifeless body and then cutting off his penis with a large machete before mutilating his corpse. An exhausted Alan admits they got lost while trying to escape and are now surrounded by the natives, whom he attempts to scare off with a flare gun. Faye is captured by the Ya̧nomamö. Alan insists they rescue her, but Mark continues filming as she is stripped, gang-raped, beaten to death, and beheaded. The Ya̧nomamö then locate and kill the last two team members as the camera falls to the ground. Disturbed, the executives order all the footage to be burned. Monroe leaves the station, pondering "who the real cannibals are".

Plot from Cannibal HolocaustCC BY-SA 4.0