Though there hasn't been an official cannibal in New Guinea since the turn-of-the century, wealthy First-Worlders flock to the Sepik River region to encounter the "primitive" haunts of their latter-day progeny. The deluxe cannibal tours are something of a packaged, cleansed version of the "heart of darkness," where the "horror" costs two dollars to photograph. O'Rourke wittily plays both sides against the middle: the tribe of tourists being ingenuously patronizing, the tribe of detoothed cannibals being unexpectedly worldly. And the coin of the realm seems to be the only realm that both tribes understand. As the European and American tourists slip noisily from their ostentatious yacht into the jungle, the tribal villagers look on with a mixture of envy and anger. Cannibal Tours uses an array of eloquent imagery to reveal the commercialized lure of the exotic. A bikini-clad German, elegantly poised in a speedboat, gazes in awe at a nearby crocodile while a blasé tribesman, garbed in traditional dress he seems to abhor, accepts an easy dollar for his photogenic pose. The giddy play of surfaces, of captured and ironic images, suggests the superficial level at which these two cultures intersect. The tourists, their sensibilities mediated by mass-culture, come only to consume the artifacts of the primitive. On the other hand, the tribal dwellers have met this appetite by serving up "images" of a culture now emptied of meaning. Of this charmed documentary, Dennis O'Rourke says, "It is an attempt to discover the place of 'the Other' in the popular imagination." It appears that the real cannibals have already gobbled up the local culture, leaving only bare bones for the imagination.