By Selwyn Harris

Robert Kerman didn't always act under his own name. Recently he has--most notably, when he played the Tug Boat Captain in the original Spiderman (2002)--but for a generation of the roughest-edged extremes of exploitation cinema, he is best remembered as R. Bolla.

"That was me," Kerman recalls. "R. Bolla. I acted in a lot of adult movies with that name. I was anonymous for a long time, but now I've been outed by computers. But I used my real name in Cannibal Holocaust, which we're going to talk about today."

Specifically, we're talking about Grindhouse Releasing's [http://www.grindhousereleasing.com] new 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Cannibal Holocaust, which is clearly one of the major DVD events of the year.

Kerman's voice is enthusiastic as we chat, but he sounds somewhat ... "put upon", would be the best term to describe it. There is a sense of unease in his speech pattern, as though there's something he wants to make clear but is holding back. Until finally he lets loose.

"Well, I put a curse on Cannibal Holocaust," he declares.

"It doesn't seem to have worked," I say. "It's still around. And people still love it. I love it."

"You do?" Kerman says. "Why? What's so special about this movie? Why would you like such a thing?"

I needed a moment to properly voice an answer.

My initial exposure to Cannibal Holocaust came in 1984, via a one-inch square ad that ran one Friday in The New York Daily News touting the movie's run at the Liberty Theater on 42nd Street. I was riding the D-train into high school. I knew what I was doing right after eighth period let out.

I had seen Cannibal Ferox (1981)--or, as we knew it then, Make Them Die Slowly--about twenty times previously, once even at the Empire Theater on the Deuce (local vernacular for 42nd Street), where it ran continuously for two years.

Ferox, like Maniac (1980) and Blood Sucking Freaks (1976), had proven to be one of those line-in-the-gore-drenched-sand films for me. There was no un-seeing it once I'd lived through it, and I only got more ambitious to up my intake of atrocity.

And Cannibal Holocaust certainly met, and exceeded, my expectations. It is at least as barbaric in nature as Ferox, but it packs more of a dramatic wallop.

Ferox plays sort of like a party (albeit one in violently bad taste). Holocaust provides food for thought mixed in with its graphic showcasing of how, in fact, we're all food for somebody.

For the makers of The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cannibal Holocaust provided a feast of ideas for re-making (sans any real credit, of course).

The Grindhouse Releasing DVD pays proper tribute to this milestone and provides hours of information and insight into the story behind Cannibal Holocaust. As I pondered all this, I tried to explain my dedication to Kerman.

"It's a real wild ride," I try to explain. "I feel electric jolts when I watch it. The first time I saw it, I literally jumped out of my seat, screaming! The things on screen are so horrible that it's like I gather some sort of strength by witnessing them. But only the fake stuff, the stuff done to humans. I can't watch the animal killings. I always look away or I leave the room."

"I'm glad you said that," Kerman tells me, sounding somewhat relieved. "Because that's why I cursed that movie--the animal cruelty. It's an unforgivable thing."

For the uninitiated (and unforgiven), Cannibal Holocaust is an entrail-wrenching, splatter-blasting, beyond horrific celluloid abomination about a group of New Yorkers who travel to the jungles of South America to shoot a film and, after some narcotic shenanigans, cook up a heap of trouble for themselves. Among the adventurers is tasty (in every sense) blonde Francesca Ciardi (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8), who makes for a flesh-baring feast (again, in every sense).

The natives that these NYC no-goodniks encounter include any number of alluringly natural, naked-as-a-jaybird females, and when the gringos take a few despicable sexual liberties with the local girls and murder one in cold blood, the men of the tribe exact brain-splitting, cock-chewing, gut-munching revenge.

The torture and subsequent corpse consumption is filmed for posterity. Later, an anthropology professor--played by Kerman--seeks to uncover exactly what happened to the ill-fated druggies. He travels to the Colombian bush and finds out. So do we.

Once he's among the unga-bunga types, all the footage shot by the crew turns up for the professor's inspection. He sees how truly savage the visiting Gothamites behaved toward the scarily war-painted headhunters--until the tables get turned, the knives come out, the poles get inserted into vaginas (and come out mouths), and the various organ meats are harvested from wailing, flailing gringos.

And then, amidst the brilliantly realistic human-on-human special-effects carnage and end-to-end nudity, Professor Kerman (and we) witness documentary depictions of live animal slaughter. A big, live lizard gets gutted. A cute, live monkey creature meets the business end of a machete. A giant, live turtle is hacked open and loses the contents of his shell in nauseating Technicolor. And it goes on from there.

It is these scenes that test the endurance of the most grue-hardened gorehounds. Even the rough-and-tumble audiences of New York City's legendary grindhouses on 42nd Street bellowed in disbelief over the course of the literal years that Cannibal Holocaust jumped from theater to theater there.

Not for nothing was Cannibal Holocaust described in its ad campaigns as "The One that Goes ALL the Way!"

And now that the Cannibal Holocaust DVD presents the film in previously unimaginable pristine quality, the opportunity is at hand to study these soul-scarring transgressions with a clarity never before possible.

The extras-teeming DVD, which was five years in the making, also features audio commentary by Robert Kerman and director Ruggero Deodato, a one-hour "making of" documentary, and a who-thought-this-was-possible on-camera interview with Deodato, Kerman, and co-star Gabriel Yorke. In addition, there are trailers, galleries, the original shooting script, and notes by horror scribe extraordinaire Chas Balun.

So how could Kerman still claim that he effectively cursed Cannibal Holocaust?

"The movie was constantly in trouble," he says. "Deodato faced charges for animal cruelty in Italy. It was banned in certain places. I was glad."

And, yet, here Kerman is doing publicity for this project he feels is hurtful--especially to himself. Why?

"Well, the movie's popularity really took me by surprise," he explains. "I mean, I was shocked. A few years back they were showing the movie at a theater in Tarrytown, New York, and they asked me to come. I wasn't doing anything at the time, so I took the bus up there. It was the first showing of the restored print and there were hundreds of people there! And they were asking me for my autograph. I was shocked. I was very happy, though. It felt good. Anything in our society that has to do with celebrity gets treated as god-like. It's as though somehow because someone appeared in movies or on TV, they're different from everyone else, on another level. And I love that feeling!"

Still, Kerman keeps his fame in proper perspective. "I don't charge money for my autographs. I know a lot of ball players do that. They didn't used to. But they do now. I never liked that idea. It made me feel skuzzy."

"How did you get mixed up in this business in the first place?" I ask.

"Well, horror was never my thing. I'm more about Frank Capra. And Michelle Pfeiffer. Send me pictures of her if you have them. Anyway, I acted in some films that were only released in Italy. One of them was a direct rip-off of Airport '79. I played the guy in the control tower. Deodato saw my performance and he wanted me for this horror adventure movie he was going to shoot down in South America. This was before I knew the true nature of Deodato."

"And what's that?" I ask.

"He's a sadist," Kerman states. "A monster. From the evil of what he showed happening to those animals to the way he treated everyone working for him. When I saw him for the first time in twenty years as we were doing an appearance for the movie, he made us wait six or seven hours for him to arrive. He was carrying on with some girl who's too young for him. When he finally got there, he said to me, 'You got fat!' And I said, 'And you're still the same prick you were twenty years ago, hanging out with young girls.' Like I said: Deodato is a sadist. So I told him how I cursed the movie.

"And the thing is," Kerman continues, "there are many elements of Cannibal Holocaust that are really very good. It's beautifully shot and put together. When we were making it, I thought, Here we have a very good adventure film in the jungle--there's some action, some horror. But then he killed the movie. Deodato killed the movie with the animal deaths. He turned it into garbage, into snuff! So I put my curse on it!"

"And, still, here we are ..."

"I know. Here we are."

Kerman lives in the same actor's residence he's occupied since the 1970s in Hell's Kitchen, the NYC neighborhood just west of the Times Square grinders and adults-only fleapits where his best-known films played continuously deep into the advent of the home-video era.

"I'm not happy with how I lived my life," Kerman says. "I'm not very proud of what I did."

"But you've got fans worldwide, people who really know and love your movies," I tell him. "And you're working again. You're acting again."

"You may be on to something," Kerman concedes. "Next time, we'll talk about R. Bolla."

Watch for that conversation to appear here in the next few weeks. In the meantime, do not wait to order the Cannibal Holocaust 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition DVD from Grindhouse Releasing[grindhousereleasing.com].

As with the company's previous, instant-classic editions of storied, long-bootlegged excursions into the most bombastic extremes of exploitation--specifically, Cannibal Ferox and I Drink Your Blood (1970)--this labor of mad love stands hooks and spears above even the most completist-minded DVDs aimed at horror fans.

Sink your teeth into it deep and steel yourself for what bites back.




Related Links: