1962 Directed by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti …
A documentary consisting of a series of travelogue vignettes providing glimpses into cultural practices throughout the world intended to shock or surprise, including an insect banquet and a memorable look at a practicing South Pacific cargo cult.
For a film featuring exploitative, racist, sexist stereotypes distorted into cartoons via juxtaposition, editing, and staging despite claiming to be a documentary, for a film that was a major hit when it was released despite being the basest kind of quasi-snuff film, for a film that even in dub is an open sneer at cultures around the world, for a film that revels in graphic violence and nudity, for a film that is nothing but crudity, this is incredibly fucking boring.
Kathleen's VHS Collection 2017: 28/100
This seems like the kind of movie some asshole would name a letterboxed page after.
I don’t usually enjoy nonwestern cultures being fetishized, but when I do, it’s gotta be via fake footage.
"Cruelty is common" - The Narrator.
Nope.
This is famous so I wanted to watch it but oof is it not good. In addition to being mostly boring, a lot of it is faked and the much of the footage is depressing and cruel.
It's evil and sucks.
Mondo Cane is frequently challenging to watch, and even though programmatic horror inevitably causes levels of desensitisation, its depictions of savagery inflicted on the animals in this film are genuinely disturbing. It's a strange documentary hybrid, an amalgamation of mockumentary, pseudo-documentary and docufiction which director Paolo Cavara exhibits with seeming sincerity in attempting to reinvent what a documentary can be. It's additionally entirely unconventional in the subject matter it confronts, and it illustrates some scathing social commentaries on humanity among its many interesting observations. It's satirical and absurdist mannerisms are underscored with some comedic music, and interestingly the theme song More was nominated as Best Original Song at the 36th Academy Awards.
It regrettably established a subgenre of films, but…
As the founder of the eponymous mondo genre, the historical import of Mondo Cane is well-documented. Unpacking why it is this particular film launched a thousand grotesque ships is another matter. It's tempting to write this off as a collection of mashed up imagery organized loosely along shock and titillation, especially given that this is the product of three directors (Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti). But more so than the obvious cues of animal cruelty and bouncing tits, there are some weirdly specific strains of imagery in here.
The film is strangely fixated on old people. For a slimy little travelogue with ample shots of bare breasted tribeswomen, I've never seen quite so many lingering, steady shots of…
To be shocked by a film like this, it's like being surprised to be wet after someone throws a bucket of water on you. It's called "shockumentary" for some reason.
A series of vignettes thats are put together in a way that are intended to provoke a reaction on the audience. We literally get scenes of a couple having a blast interpolated with a scene of a tribe beating the leaving shit out of a pork or some Chinese people cooking some dogs. No censorship whatsoever. It's a parallel of society, the good and the bad.
All in all, not something for vegas or those with a faint of heart. If you can handle the truth and are seeking a for some shock value, this is a good place to start.
Very odd and entertaining! I usually review just horror and this is not quite horror but can be very brutal and morbid! Just give it a try. It will be nothing like anything you have seen before!
Disturbing December 2021 10/31
There is both very much and very little to be said about Mondo Cane, an almost comically Western saga of vile exploitation.
The film's flagrantly racist intermeshings of various stereotypes about various cultures act as a sort of monolith of ignorance; countless forms of different prejudices become one, in a sense. Each and every one of the offensive, boring vignettes begin to sort of run together in a red, white and blue blur of blind hatred for what appears to be prominently East Asian civilization(s).
The narrator matter-of-factly tells of his great disgust towards these foreign countries and their cultures, so much so that the film as a whole becomes a chore to get through. His long,…
Remarkably racist, brainless, remorseless piece of stone age hate-mongering that is both cowardly and arrant on every level of exploitation and genre. These imperialist zombies don’t even attempt to hide their vitriol toward the indigenous and Asian, ironically coming off just as savage and skanky as their stereotypes of the non-white populace. Wilderness survival TV shows depict animal cruelty too, but at least they don’t use it as a baseline to shill ethnopurist idiocy.
