Mondo Cane (1962)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

When I first heard of Gualtiero Jacopetti, I first decided to watch Africa Addio. Then, this movie caught my attention. Mondo Cane(Italian for Dog World) tells a definitive but shocking story of how royally screwed up the world is and may serve a purpose considered the fact that we live in the same screwed-up world today. The only two scenes that I couldn't bear to watch was the beginning of this movie and the scene where dogs were skinned and cooked at a Taiwanese restaurant(Mainly because I'm a dog lover myself). There are also other scenes that made me scratch my head and think "Is any of this stuff real?" such as the dedication of Rudolph Valentino at Italy, sailors going gah-gah over women in bikinis, bulls that are decapitated in Nepal, and many others. Like it or not, Mondo Cane is hard to avoid. I'd skip the scenes with the animals, but stay tuned to the others. PS, the music is enjoyable to listen to!

Renowned as an exploitation film, but I think that, like Jacopetti's other renowned exploitation film Africa Addio, it's highly misunderstood as simply sensationalist or sadistic.It isn't as "radical" as Africa Addio in fact. Similarly it is a very misanthropic, perhaps even racist (against all races) film, but the shocking, violent, cruel scenes are not its peaks.Baraka, which is devoid of any such shocking scenes, gives what is basically the same message but in a less explicit and "logical" (relating to words) way. What a sick species is humankind, and everywhere, regardless of differences in class or race, men live in sh!t, in repetitive and destructive cultures and behaviours.Mondo Cane is much more explicit in its message, and the comparison between modern civilizations and ancient tribes, and between humans and other animals.

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.

Not for the faint of heart or for those easily offended or easily bored by documentary 'filler'. This film and its' sequel are documents of a different time,....the 1960's, way before the internet, cable and satellite TV brought us the world instantly. It brought the world to the masses. People were not jumping on planes and going to Africa, Asia or anywhere else like we do now. These brought the unusual strange parts of the world to them at their local cinema.Violent, Odd and downright strange are good words to describe this film.Not your typical documentary film, to be sure. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!