Originally Posted by Giganticface
**SPOILERS**
Don't read this if you want to watch the film and get the full, shocking effect. A film like this, you can only experience once for the first time.
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No animals are really tortured, but several are killed, although you could make a case that the tortoise didn't suffer the quickest of deaths.
One is a snake slowly squeezing a small mammal to death -- something you might see on Animal Planet. Another is a little monkey thing gets the top of its head chopped off and a native slurps the brains out. (Two were actually killed in the shooting of the scene.) The tortoise scene is the most infamous, where natives dissect a giant tortoise and eat its guts. I think there might also be a giant lizard killed and eaten, but I might be thinking of a different cannibal film.
None of these bothered me too much from a moral standpoint because they all represented natural occurrences, or natives killing animals to eat. I'm not a vegetarian, and I accept the fact that animals kill other animals. However, they were pretty gross, the tortoise scene being downright nauseating. The actress in the scene seems quite affected, and as it turns out, she was pretty traumatized.
The one animal death that I did find shocking was when one of the actors playing a documentarian shot a pig for no reason while going on a rampage. This was shocking because it was not a documentary-like capture of an animal death for the purpose of eating, but rather a story element written into the narrative. (However, I'd be surprised if the natives didn't eat the animal off camera, as it's clearly one of their livestock raised for food.) I also found it unsettling that it involved an actor waving around a loaded gun, and actually firing it, and actually killing something. Regardless of what you think of the animal death, this is exactly the type of scene that makes this film so effective, and at times you start considering the possibility that other parts of the film are real.
Everyone always points out the animal deaths as being the most exploitative and unnecessary part of this film. However, there is a scene where video footage of *real human deaths* is being viewed, but in the script, the video is described as fake (which isn't true). This is actually part of the brilliance of the film. The viewer never knows for sure what's real and what's fake, and the overall effect is unnerving.
If you are interested in being shocked, I recommend seeing this film. All the other Italian cannibal films have similar animal death scenes, but this one is so much better than the rest in its writing, acting, social commentary, and effective, purposeful use of exploitation. It's also perhaps the first film that explores a found footage technique.
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