A New York University professor returns from a rescue mission to the Amazon rainforest with the footage shot by a lost team of documentarians who were making a film about the area's local cannibal tribes.

In this fascinating and well executed documentary film theorist and cult expert Xavier Mendik places "Cannibal Holocaust" in a broader context.

A microcosm of people lost in search of an artificial happiness, which leads them to steal and prostitute themselves for the short ecstasy of a squirt of heroin in the veins. Marco and Pina live in this world of drugs, prostitution and violence, and they must fight for their survival. One day one of their friend dies during a holdup. Marco and Pina are helpless and will do anything to escape, but fate does not want a similar world. Between bites of heroin and sidewalk they are in a deadly trance.

Marco, a young Roman reporter, travels to Zaire to carry out a report commissioned by an important naturalistic magazine, but when he arrives in Africa he comes across an illicit drug trafficking.

One November evening a late night visitor to a shopping centre brings about a chain reaction of events that lead to a full scale invasion. Have the undead risen from the grave, or is it something far more sinister?