Mondo Cane (1962)

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This was a documentary film featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but I was surprised to find out it was rated the lowest rating by the critics, one out of five stars, so I had to see why that was. Basically the title is translated as "world of dogs", or alternatively "a dog's life", it is not for a reason, and narrated by Stefano Sibaldi this is a documentary without any specific subject, it was made to shock, so it is obviously called a "shockumentary". Throughout the film are many random images where the filmmakers have travelled around the world and found the surreal, bizarre, upsetting, disgusting, perverted, inhuman and unthinkable things people and cultures do. This includes dogs in a dog pound, a tribe on an island man-hunting, a naval ship with sailors spotting women in boats, a tribes woman breast feeding a baby pig, a poverty stricken tribe that have eaten humans in cannibalism, pigs being beaten and cooked and a dog cemetery with mourners wandering it. There is also an Asian community eating various breeds of dog as meat, newborn chicks painted with coloured dye and dried in an oven to be put inside easter eggs, geese force fed food with a funnel shoved down their throats, and calves being tenderised by massaging and drinking six bottles of beer a day for fattening. You also see women caged and fattened for months to be offered as wives for a dictator, fat women rolling and exercising in a gymnasium and on fat burning machines, various canned insects and animals eaten as restaurant dishes including: grasshopper, honey bees, lava worms, ants, musk rat, rattlesnake, beetles and butterfly eggs; and snakes chosen by a customer to be skinned and eaten. After this there are men making their legs bleed by hitting them with cutting glass and looking like Jesus with barbed wire wrapped around their heads, a womens lifeguard troupe marching on a beach and demonstrating rescuing staged drowning people, birds that live underground, fish living on land and in trees, and thousands of eggs on the ground that will never hatch. Following this we see a sea turtle laying its eggs and heading for sea but dying in heat going the wrong direction, an underwater cemetery full of human skulls and skeletons, sun dried fins on a beach being collected by people with missing limbs, and sharks being fed sea urchins as revenge for killing people which makes them suffocate for days and die. Afterwards is a cemetery museum filled with skull decorations, these skulls and bones being cleaned and repaired by children, a German beer house with drunken stupidity, the drunks walking home, dozing, being violent and dancing on the streets; money being burnt by people as part of a funeral to be "taken" by the deceased, and a boarding house for dying people. Finally is a large cemetery full of wrecked cars, an orchestra playing, a Hawaii travel organisation with women and tourists doing the hula, soldiers dressing as women and dancing, men cutting off live bull heads, hundreds of people running from a bull, men training for bullfighting being charged, and a crashed cargo plane on a hill where tribes people wait for some arrival (of another plane or something). I agree entirely with the critics giving the lowest of low rating for this film, but I have to admit, I did find most of it fascinating to watch, not necessarily in the good way, but I couldn't take my eyes off, but it was a disgusting documentary. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Music, Original Song for the song "More". Pretty poor!

"Mondo Cane" of 1962 is the first of a bunch of Italian 'Mondo' Shockumentaries and, without any doubt, an immensely influential piece of Exploitation cinema. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Carva came up with an entirely new style of film-making with this, and back in 1962 it must have made even greater an impact on audiences, and also been more shocking than it is now. While some folks might point out that "Mondo Cane" may seem slightly dated, one must not forget that this was revolutionary and ground-breaking for its time and highly influential for many films to come. "Mondo Cane" has spawned quite a bunch of other 'Mondo' films including the sequel "Mondo Cane 2" as well as the notorious "Addio Zio Tom" (1971), and furthermore served as an influence to countless exploitation classics including masterpieces such as Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980). But it is not merely the film's classic status and influence that make this worth watching. "Mondo Cane" is a highly interesting, and often bizarrely ironical film as such, and everybody interested in Exploitation cinema should see it at least once."Mondo Cane" shows more or less unrelated scenes from around the world, some of which are shocking, others comical. To label the film as sensationalist may be justified to a certain point, but people who are bothered by this are probably not best advised to watch Exploitation cinema anyway. The scenes include such different things as drunk people behaving like drunk people do, or scenes in a massage parlor, the slaughtering of animals (these are real documentary shots, so Peta and pals are probably best advised not to see them), or bizarre religious rituals. While the film is a documentary it is not to 100 per cent. Inbetween real scenes there are some which are obviously fake, and several with which neither is obvious and which cold be either staged or real. Some might label the premise of "Mondo Cane" voyeuristic or sensationalist, but the film never looks down upon the depicted people, especially not tribesmen of so-called primitive cultures. Some of the scenes are actually quite funny, and make it harder to take the whole thing seriously, but then, some of them are highly interesting, some of them shocking (in a comparatively un-explicit manner), and in some parts, especially in the second half, the film becomes downright fascinating. The brilliant score by maestro Riz Ortolani adds a lot to the atmosphere and overall value of the film. "Mondo Cane" is narrated, and the voice-overs are actually quite interesting without seeming too serious for the films own good. One may look at this film in one way or another, but the least one can say is that Giacopetti and Cavara deserve great respect as pioneers. Not to be missed by fans of Exploitation/Cult cinema!

Whoa, this pre-MPAA film ratings system film, Mondo Cane, must have been quite a surprise to Gram and Gramps when they walked you in. The movie opens with a powerful sequence in which a wheezing and gnashing dog is dragged down a line of other not dissimilarly vicious dogs, twisting and snapping, before it's thrown in among them, behind the gate of a dusty and dirt-packed kennel, on the other side and the fence there, only to be assaulted and attacked by the entire gang of –dogs that is. Then, moving on to another interesting human to animal interaction scene, we're shown a set of New Guinea tribal elders ceremonially blunting a field of wild boars, each to a convulsive death, with a tree trunk that was fashioned into a dull point.What's of most notable interest here in this trend-setter of a picture is not the xenophobic representations (don't let the tag line fool you, these are representations) of our world citizens indigenous to the African and Asian contents –no, you get greater depth of story in Porno Holocaust which is an exclusive treatment on the topic of nuclear contamination- but rather the Otherization of the Los Angeles Hollywood American figure. For instance why in the world did comedic actor Jerry Lee Lewis honor his dead pet with a five-thousand dollar tombstone made of pure granite? And Zanuck, he and his clan did that too… Oh, just how easy it is, kids, in San Bernardino with all the violent machinery of the automobile graveyard to pack your Packard into a cube and ship it overseas to be made into some other "much smaller car." Making a pseudo-documentary about death and sex in series hyper-exoticized locations, while essentially meaningless, is just one Italian way of breaking the bank. Regardless, I'm quite looking forward to seeing Mondo Topless, because it has to be firm that one question didn't fail to pass the innocent lips of a San Francisco strip club on-looker and patron: "What the hell are those Italians doing here with those movie cameras?" Yo!

As a big fan of cult cinema, there's usually at least one film I like in each of the main genres (with the exception of Nazisploitation), and although this is only the second 'Mondo' film that I've seen; I doubt I'll ever have a favourite in this one. Surprisingly, there was actually quite a few of these films made (I could never see them having mass market appeal, but I'm wrong apparently) and Mondo Cane was the one that kicked it all off. These films would go on to try and top each other in terms of shock value as more and more were made; but since this was the first one, it's not as shocking as some of the later ones. The Italian word 'Mondo' literally translates into English as 'world' and that is actually quite fitting as this film could be described as a visual representation of various things that go on in both the animal and human worlds. The film takes a documentary approach, although it couldn't really be considered a documentary as not all of it is exactly real, with several obviously fake sequences getting mixed in along with the real stuff.The film is not very strong, shock-wise, in terms of gore or nastiness; but it is an entirely bleak film. Just about everything in it paints a bad picture of the world; we've got tribal men taking revenge on a shark, turtles baking in the sun, people gathering up shark fins off the beach etc. A lot of the footage shown in the film is fake, and unfortunately most of is obviously fake too. This is a shame because a lot of what the film has to say is interesting; it's just hard to take seriously. I can't say I'm a big fan of documentaries in general, but rated as a documentary; this film falls down again. There's a voice-over that runs throughout, and is actually quite entertaining and informative, but there's no real narrative to the film and it does feel a lot like the filmmakers just filmed a load of stuff on a similar topic and then just stuck it all together - and to be honest, I reckon that probably is what happened. There's not really very much to recommend this film for and I wonder who it was actually aimed at; but it's interesting for the fact that it's the first 'mondo' film and some of the things in it are worth seeing...even if they are fake.