Wordiezett So much average

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Rectangular_businessman I loathe this movie.It is totally hateful, from beginning to end, to the point of being unbearable to watch.I never saw in my entire life any other film with so much expressed disdain towards life. There were moments when I had the impression that the guy who directed this film had a truly and utter hate for Humanity and life in general as well. But maybe I'm over thinking things. The most probably thing is that he just were a hack obsessed with shock value, pretty much like Ruggero Deodato (Director of the infamous and almost equally awful "Cannibal Holocaust") Anyway, this is a terrible film, and I consider this to be one of the worst movies ever made.

jaibo The big daddy of the Mondo movies remains, nearly half a century after its release, one of the most entertaining, eye-popping, colourful, repulsive and challenging films ever made. A whirlwind compendium of colour documentary footage – some of it real, some of it staged – from the four corners of the globe, Mondo Cane assaults and assails the viewer with a non-stop cavalcade of extraordinary sights, showing the strange customs of mankind both "primitive" and "civilised" all taking place in the early 1960s. The whole thing is beautifully photographed, lushly scored and edited with a skill and daring that few films can compete with.The challenge of Mondo Cane is that, as opposed to the received wisdom on documentary film-making, it refuses to elucidate, argue, educate or inform through its footage. It simply throws the stuff in the viewer's face, asking them to spin from one contrasting (or, more often, bizarrely similar) curiosity to another. So in the first few sequences of the film we fly from a remembrance ceremony for Valentino in his birthplace (all the men look like him due to the inbreeding in the area) to the then-current Italian heartthrob Rosanno Brazzi having his shirt ripped off by a bunch of screaming New York Maenads in a fashionable tailor's shop to a pack of New Guinea women chasing men on the beach in a spring rite. Soon things take a turn for the worse, and we get into some stomach churning footage of animal cruelty with pigs being slaughtered by another tribe of natives, puppy dogs skinned and cooked in Tai Pehi, geese force-fed for foie gras. Later sections of the film become more poignant, if not more shocking, as the effect of atomic bomb test contamination on animals in the Bikini atoll are depicted (a turtle has lost its sense of direction and cannot make it back to the sea), the dying languish in a Singapore House of the Dead as their living relatives feast outside and a Cargo cult attempts to lure planes they believe come from their ancestors away from the "trap" of the white man's airport. All this and so much more… The film is by turns amusing, nauseating, shocking and moving. It is not, however, manageable by the intellect as a "cohesive" statement of a rational point of view; far from bring a failure on the part of the film makers, this is the film's greatest triumph. The world and human society in it has an abundance of irrational behaviours, and Mondo Cane simply swirls these around the viewer's eyes and minds without anything useful to say about them, because nothing useful CAN be said about them – they simply are. The most the film manages is the wry, mordant, cynical outlook of its narrator, who simply talks us through the sequences with the world-weary through-the-motions lack of enthusiasm that a tour guide too long in the job might have. But also, what Mondo Cane does do is successfully blur the boundaries between both "primitive" and "civilised" societies, and between animal and human life. For everyone, it's "a dog's life" and the film appropriately begins with disturbing and arresting footage of a dog being dragged towards a pound, intermixing action shots with POV shots – we are watching the dog and feeling his situation with him.There does seem to be some ecological concerns expressed in the film. The Bikini atoll sequences are very tragic and harrowing, and when I reflect back on the film and picture the drunken Germans desperately trying to enjoy an orgy of alcohol and contrast them with the last remaining stone age tribe in New Guinea, I can't say that "civilised" man is shown in the better light. Yet the tribes of New Guinea are clearly nearing their extinction, and through the invasion of this film's lens are dragged into the old Mondo Cane with the rest of us.I am not sure that Jacopetti and Prosperi have been given enough credit for their achievement in this film; their mise-en-scene and POV is relentlessly non-progressive and they have been punished by critics for their refusal of liberal politics, their hopelessness, their populism and their genius for cinema as entertainment. But it may be that Jacopetti and Prosperi will have the last laugh, as when the viewers of the future want to experience what mid-20th century life was like, like as not they'll head straight for Mondo Cane. It may also be that they will accept the thing that critics find it most difficult to handle – that fact and fiction are indelibly intermingled in our life, and so the mixture of "real" and "faked" footage that Mondo Cane deals with is actually the best way of getting at what can really be called Reality.

Witchfinder General 666 "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!

trotter-gc This movie was occasionally shown on television late at night in the mid 60s. My friends and I would stay up late at night on weekends and once in a while catch this and similar movies. It was very intriguing...my first exposure to the strangeness outside my small world.I recall a few specific scenes, including one from France that involved the ritualistic slicing of young men's faces by a barber with a straight-edged razor, as a mark of membership in some club. Most scenes, however, were from the farthest reaches of the planet, which made them seem altogether foreign and mysterious. Another scene I just recalled involved an African man being chased into the sea by some angry countrymen, and his eventual drowning. (Today, that would seem quite tame.) The film was mainly the chronicling of truly bizarre customs encountered in nooks and crannies around the world.The primary impetus of the production may have been to sensationalize, but it was also quite fascinating. I haven't seen it in decades, but I would like to.