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49 reviews in total

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19 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
humorous and beautiful, 2 May 2004

Author: accidentalmedia from Edinburgh

Simply stunning images. Well-shot, and expertly edited for maximum effect. The shots of the Japanese guys massaging cow's asses were particularly incredible. Though much of the shock was lost due to the effects of passing time and the condescending commentary, it is still interesting to see (the foie- gras sequence should be enlightening for anyone who still eats the stuff). Mondo Cane may have kicked off the shock-reality genre, but it reads as an interesting exploration of normality, raising questions about difference and anthropological methods. Well worth the two hours...

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18 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
take this "documentary" with a grain of salt, 14 December 2004
Author: Sammy Eisenhower (imdb-3495) from Santa Cruz, California

please, as you watch this documentary, realize that although the narration is spoken in a straight, scientific tone, in actuality the narration is full of hyperbole, invention, and jokes. sometimes, the narration is close to the truth; sometimes, the narration is campy and silly. the tone does not change, however, and you are left on your own to decide what is real and what is not. it must be said that anthropologists and scientists were not closely consulted for this film. the fish found on tree branches and out of water have done that for 1000s of years. the atom bomb test did not suddenly cause that behavior.

one must even question whether or not the crew manipulated some of the scenes. for example, if a sea turtle is dying in the sun, how could it end up dead on its back?

please, watch this alleged documentary with a careful eye.

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13 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
The source of all those drive-in Mondo potboilers of the sixties is still quite a hoot today., 22 March 2004
Author: TheVid from Colorado Springs

As retro films go, Mondo Cane is still a refreshing take on schlock, documentary filmmaking, hilariously camp in it's motives and of more than passing interest in this age of reality TV. The setups and prurient approach that made these films popular at the time of their release is only re-reflected in the equally blatant, reality trash that has successfully been permeating TV since the turn of the new century. It's stunning just how the tastes of pop-culture audiences have changed in the last 50 years or so. A retrospective of the Mondo film genre is represented beautifully in a nicely-packaged DVD box set, which includes a terrifically interesting documentary on the two filmmakers, Jacopetti and Prosperi, who started the trend with this Italian potboiler back in 1962. MONDO CANE is not as dated as some would lead you to believe, particularly if you examine the motives behind it, and the method of it's humor and social commentary. Perhaps the most significant contribution MONDO CANE offers as a film chronicle, and undeniably the most artistic, is the Riz Ortolani/Nino Oliviero music score which includes one of the great melodies of the 20th Century, MORE. MONDO CANE is a "reality" movie sure to please even the most jaded multiplexer. Beautifully photographed and scored.

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13 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating., 3 January 2002

Author: gridoon

Uneven but fascinating documentary on bizarre customs around the world. It has a few dull stretches (the auto junkyard scene) and the narration sometimes gets a little too condescending. But there are also unforgettable scenes (the giant sea turtle that has lost any sense of orientation, great bullfighting footage) that make "Mondo Cane" essential viewing for anyone who is even mildly interested in cult films. (***)

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10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Bizarre mix of the amusing, disgusting and disturbing. Still powerful after 25 years!, 13 February 2007
Author: DVD_Connoisseur from England

Watching "Mondo Cane" some 25 years after it originally shocked cinema audiences, I still found myself experiencing a variety of emotions. Despite the dated presentation (in many ways, this actually enhances the weirdness of the whole experience), the film still packs a mild punch, even to this jaded viewer.

A combination of the amusing (would-be actors posing themselves for the camera and geriatric Hollywood residents working out on a variety of unusual equipment), the sad (turtles on a radioactive Bikini beach, having lost their ability to find water, head away from the sea and into the scorching sand and certain death) and the shocking (animal cruelty including bull fighting) results in a powerful cocktail.

The cynical, xenophobic narrator delivers a witty commentary while the proceedings unfold on the screen.

Superbly edited and scored, this is definitely a different viewing experience. A journey into bizarreville; 7 out of 10.

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6 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
" Behold, the best of the worse. Isn't that what the world desires more of? ", 30 January 2009

Author: thinker1691 from USA

This planet which many humans believe is theirs, has so many mysterious aspects that when a cinematic camera and light are turned on it, are interestingly illuminated like the elusive creatures of the night. A world traveler may go seeking the strange, the unusual, the bizarre and occasionally the forbidden and often find much more than he bargained for. That is what the film "Mondo Cane" is all about. It is a black collection of the many unusual parts of our strange world. The film travels around the globe seeking out the odd customs of various people and offers them up as interesting fare to the ambivalent traveler, the timidly interested and the curiously morbid. In each country visited, we find that what one nation finds disgusting, another finds tolerable. One nation offers up unusual human sexual practices, which another country often finds offensive, tasteless and guttural. Animals in one country are revered, honored and treated as royalty. Yet in a neighboring nation, these same beasts are prepared as special delicacies fit for consumption. Women, boys and pain seeking parishioners are accepted as sacrificial fodder. Viewers are treated to the world's most primitive customs and often as not we see ourselves at the very depth of depravity and learn it is not polite to stare, which we do anyway. A frightening movie, but one which reveals more about us than we care to know. Still, one cannot turn away without wanting to see 'MORE' which happens to be the Theme Song of this same picture. ****

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7 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
misunderstood, 22 July 2003
Author: abxy6000 from Toronto, Ontario

Although i cannot say that this was an especially good movie, I can say that you should not see it as an exploitation of other cultures, but as a view of the world from an indifferent point of view. Even though the film might have been made as a way of shocking viewers and making a profit, you should take from it the fact that what seems shocking or unusual by us can be of nature to others, and things we do in our everyday lives can seem shocking to others. i give it a 6/10.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Mondo Numero Uno, 29 January 2009

Author: Benjamin Gauss from Salzburg, Austria

"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!

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
All the world's a Mondo, 6 March 2009

Author: jaibo from England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
A great way to start a very influential career, 9 October 2003
Author: chris (christophaskell@hotmail.com) from Premiere Video (Dallas, Tx)

Whether or not the narrator has all of the facts straight (as he has been accused of not having), the team of directors Cavara and Jacopetti have captured some of the most amazing footage ever featured in a documentary. All of these traditions probably do not still go on today, making this a truly fascinating glimpse into the history of how different cultures viewed and dealt with death. Presented in a totally unbiased nature, Cavara and Jacopetti simply show the events, and let the viewer decide whether or not the footage is shocking; in my opinion the best way to shoot a documentary. No disrespect is paid to any of the featured cultures, rather a strange reverence and respect for. Any amount of shocking footage is intended not to be shocking, but instead, I feel, to show the absurd amount of dedication we have to tradition. In an unbiased, unflinching way, we're showed death of everything from animals and humans, all the way to automobiles. Cavara and Jacopetti should be applauded for the influence they have had in the documentary genre, and for this great film that started it all. Rating: 30/40

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