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Reviews Counted:25
Fresh:16
Rotten:9
Average Rating:5.7/10
Consensus: American Cannibal is a scathing, funny exploration of America's obsession with constructed realism and fame.
Theatrical Release:Mar 16, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: "American Cannibal" pushes beyond "Fahrenheit/911" and "Supersize Me" to break new ground in documentary territory. Rather than forcing situations and twisting facts to tell a story, filmmakers... [More]
American Cannibal is ostensibly about the phony, exploitative nature of reality TV, and though documentarians Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro hit that point too hard by piling up interviews with TV experts who speak in exaggerated cautionary tones,
"American Cannibal" is a fast-paced satire about the state reality television that builds its humor on its depiction of the limits our current reality TV craze.
This was much better when Mel Brooks did it back in the '60s.
Reality TV often consists of greasy hybrids -- it's The Osbournes meets Andrew Dice Clay! -- and this exposé of how the reality sausage gets made, is itself less than pure.
Top CriticA genuine cinematic hoot, while also providing insight into the ways of American mass entertainment.
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essential viewing for any latter-day TV watcher.
Reality television is painful enough to watch at home, let alone on the big screen, but directors Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro somehow didn't get the message.
The real savagery is in the satire, coldly measuring the lengths to which contestants might go and the depths to which the protagonists sink.
How far would you go to eat a finger?
The picture is mesmerizing, in a crash-on-the-highway sense; but the fact that your worst suspicions about the people who cook up some of this stuff are confirmed is in no way gratifying.
What's here is a glimpse not into how far people will go to win a reality-TV show, but how far greedy writers and producers will go to degrade, debauch and enrich themselves.
Top CriticReality TV has rarely cared much about truth -- and maybe this is the doc it deserves. The crass truthiness here is far more apt than any of the glossy satire in American Dreamz.
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Top CriticUntil everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it’s absorbing in a sick way.
Top CriticNot so much an examination of the tragic trajectory of an ill-fated reality-TV show but just the biggest hoax since The Blair Witch Project.
American Cannibal would be interesting if it weren't so 2001.
Top CriticIf there's one thing to be learned from American Cannibal, it's this: Pursuing a career in the TV industry is only for those with a superhuman tolerance for sleazy opportunism.
Less a piece of incisive cultural commentary than a riveting portrait of two nice guys whose lives and careers go into a tailspin, one moral compromise at a time.
For all of its self-consciously sophisticated layering, American Cannibal manages a few authentically dark moments of its own.
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