I often ask the question as to whether a documentary film should be considered real cinema. After all documentaries are in most cases Journalistic in nature. These films do make use of cinematic art to make their points. Sometimes they succeed in having extremely effective results. The Italian documentarians Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti, in 1962 realized that they can refine this art for the sole purpose of shock and in so doing make documentaries into a commercial success. The film they created was, Mondo Cane, and its success spawned countless tasteless imitations that would also later develop into a disgusting genre called exploitation horror. This movie is an ongoing spectacle of vignettes that aim to excite and shock its viewers. Watching it I found myself never bored but also very disgusted. The goal of the film is to show strange and bizarre customs us humans have, and while no real point is made, I guess one can say that the strangeness and wickedness of the human race is universal. This is because the camera here spans a series of travelogue scenes which span the breadth of the Globe, from the USA to Papa New Guinea. While there is no extended theme to these segments I found the reality of extreme cruelty to animals as one of the main propositions shown. Vegans should stay clear of this film. I would actually advise anybody who remotely likes animals not to watch. We are treated to among other atrocities, beating pigs to death, forcefully stuffing food into trapped geese for their liver and baking live baby chicks with tinted color so that they can be live decorations to Easter eggs. Not everything shown concerns animals but all of it is cold and lacking any decent feelings. To top it all off some of the vignettes are staged and some of them contain misleading statements from the cold detached narrator. The movie is actually professionally made with bright and startling color cinematography that helps to catch the viewer’s attention. The film’s commercial success paved the way for not only copy cat so called, “Mondo” films but for purveyors of the fictionalized and cheap exploitation film that pretended to be real portrayals of rape, murder and cannibalism. That is another reason to hate this movie. While never boring, “Mondo Cane”, is a nauseating piece of film making that any decent person needs to stay far away from.
1001 Movies before you die 