News

Terry Kiser and Andrew McCarthy in Weekend At Bernie’sScreenshot: 20th Century Fox

35 years ago this week, Weekend At Bernie’s opened its modest theatrical run. The film grossed about $30 million on a $15 million budget, barely turning a profit when accounting for marketing costs. But you’d never know that...

Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi achieved notoriety in 1962 with the sensationalistic documentary Mondo Cane, a globetrotting exposé of bizarre rites and other human grotesqueries that opened the floodgates for a deluge of Mondo titles. When the release of their 1966 film Africa Addio (a.k.a. Africa: Blood and Guts), a despairing look at the continent’s decolonization movements, led to accusations of racism, Jacopetti and Prosperi sought to address the charges by revealing (some would say reveling in) the history of slavery in America. The resulting film, Goodbye Uncle Tom, is an extremely disturbing, at times almost unwatchable, descent into the inferno of an unpardonable institution.

Goodbye Uncle Tom leaves any pretense of objectivity behind in the dust. Using a conceit similar to such Peter Watkins classics as Culloden and The War Game, Jacopetti and Prosperi’s film brings modern-day documentary technology back into a historical setting, using it in...

The Killer.How do you make a good movie in this country and be jumped on?Once, in 1967, in the opener for her Bonnie and Clyde review, Pauline Kael asked the opposite question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” Now, times have changed. Nothing provokes us to jump and say, “Hold the torches! That’s the key! The way forward.”An automatic film like David Fincher’s new thriller, The Killer, comes and goes with the velocity of a Twitter news cycle: about six fervent days of talk. (The seventh and beyond? Fits and bursts of takes amid miles of silence.) Whether you think it’s good or bad, The Killer has not lingered in the popular consciousness. And I can’t imagine it lingering. It might have passed me by with the similarly fleeting presence of recent moving-image works like Richard Linklater...

“You may never sit through another movie as truly sickening as this…and it’s all real!” This is a quote from the review site Sex Gore Mutants about the film Mondo Cane (1962), and it’s bright and bold on the cover of the film’s DVD that was released in 2008. It’s a sentiment that a lot of people share about the film, which shows various scenes of “real” life such as animal slaughter, death rituals, and the juxtaposition of practices from different parts of the world. The movie places a heavy emphasis on the fact that everything you’re seeing is real and that if it’s shocking to you, it’s only because you live in a world that’s shocking. Sex, suffering, and death are things that unite us as humans, Mondo Cane says. It doesn’t need to make things up to sicken you when...

Dog. Man’s best friend, and also his greatest muse.

Since the beginning of film history, humans have found a way to put a puppies and canines on screen. One of the very first British movies was the 1905 silent short “Rescued by Rover,” about a Collie leading her master to their kidnapped baby. That film launched the career of Blair, the first canine onscreen actor, and defined how dogs would be depicted in cinema for centuries: loyal, smart, resourceful, and lovable.

From there, canine actors began appearing at a steady clip throughout film history. They appeared in comedies like Charlie Chaplin’s “A Dog’s Life” and teary dramas like “Old Yeller.” And kid-friendly companies like Disney churned out film after film centering dogs, like “Homeward Bound” and the “Air Bud” franchise. The dog movie is maybe not the most well-respected genre in the history of film, but it’s hard...

The year is sometime in the near future, apparently, and society has collapsed for vague reasons. Well, some of it has. Some of it hasn’t. Or maybe it only has if you squint really hard.

The Italian post-apocalyptic coming-of-age crime drama “Mondocane” is big on attitude but very short on details, presenting a world of violent gangs and oppressive police against a backdrop that’s so similar to what’s going on today, and so unexplored in all its sci-fi trappings, that one can’t help but wonder why it’s set in the future at all.

Dennis Protopapa, in his feature film debut, plays the title character, Pietro, who quickly earns the name “Dogworld” after he torches a pet shop to earn his place in a gang called “The Ants.” He’s grown up by the seashore with his best friend Cristian, and if you thought “Dogworld” was an unfortunate nom de guerre,...

The French duo behind “The Last Hillbilly,” which received a Special Mention in the First Appearance category at IDFA, have been pitching their new project at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel.

“A Dog’s Life” will follow the journey of six teenage girls from the juvenile detention center in Bakersfield as they embark on a rehabilitation program: for three months, the girls will attempt to mend their own lives by taking care of a rescued dog.

Diane Sara Bouzgarrou told Variety how she and partner Thomas Jenkoe were inspired to pick up where they had left off with their first feature collaboration.

“We finished our last doc, ‘The Last Hillbilly,’ filming kids who were on the edge of teenagehood. The wild fires in California were very much a concern for them so we felt our next film should start where that one had ended,” she said.

They focused on Bakersfield,...

Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled its VdR-Industry selection, which includes 27 projects in different stages of production.

The works will be invited to participate in three key forums – VdR-Pitching, VdR-Work in Progress and VdR-Rough Cut Lab – that run as part of the fest’s industry activities in Nyon from April 10-14.

Those who cannot make it to the festival will be able to participate online but organizers are focusing strongly on the in-person event.

“We can’t wait to finally welcome back project holders and industry representatives to the shores of Lake Geneva. We feel strengthened by the lessons we have learned from the digital and hybrid editions of the last two years. In fact, they have opened up new possibilities in terms of activities format and allowed us to widen the range of professionals participating in VdR–Industry,” said Madeline Robert, head of industry and artistic advisor of Visions du Réel,...

Under Childhood is a column on children’s cinema—movies about and for kids.In 1983, a characteristically intense Dennis Hopper remarked to the New York Times: “Most of the people I knew in my 20's are dead. [...] Forty-year-olds are survivors.” Fatefully Hopper’s punk bildungsroman Out of the Blue (1980) has found new life at 40 thanks to a crowd-funded 4K restoration. Formerly available mostly through faded reels and VHS rips, the film’s difficult but enduring passage through history repeats its story’s own narrative, though rescued from its hopeless end. In the film, sixteen-year-old Cindy “CeBe” Barnes undergoes sexual abuse by her alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper) and the neglect of her heroin-addicted mother (Sharon Farrell). Faced with what feels like the dead end of her short life, she chooses to leave the world behind in an act of self-immolation, taking both parents with her. As the Neil Young song that...

Disney+ has revealed the official trailer and key art for ‘Turner & Hooch,’ the original series premiering Wednesday, July 21.

When an ambitious, buttoned-up US Marshal inherits a big unruly dog, he soon realizes the dog he didn’t want may be the partner he needs. The series stars Josh Peck as Scott Turner, son of Detective Scott Turner portrayed by Tom Hanks in the 1989 film of the same name.

The series also stars as Carra Patterson as Jessica Baxter, Scott’s brave, street-smart partner; Brandon Jay McLaren as Xavier Wilson, a cool, enigmatic marine-turned-us Marshal; Anthony Ruivivar as Chief James Mendez, Scott’s boss with a secret soft spot for Scott’s new dog, Hooch; Lyndsy Fonseca as Laura Turner, Scott’s sweet, animal-loving sister; Jeremy Maguire as Matthew Garland, Laura’s dog-loving son; and Vanessa Lengies as Erica Mouniere, the quirky head of the US Marshals dog training program.

Léo Kouper, who passed away last week at the age of 94, was rather unusual among poster artists for having a special association with one filmmaker, his being Charlie Chaplin. From the early 1950s through the early ’70s Kouper created some of the most striking and charming Chaplin poster designs for almost all his feature films. Born in Paris on August 20, 1926, Kouper was mentored from the age of 19 by the great French poster artist Hervé Morvan (1917-1980) who was nine years his senior. Morvan did his fair share of movie posters, including a stunning double panel Grand Illusion, but is best known for his bold, colorful, child-like illustrations advertising French products like Gitanes, Perrier and Lanvin Chocolate.Kouper’s illustration work is in a similar faux naïf style to Morvan’s and its simplicity and charm no doubt appealed to Chaplin over the years. His first Chaplin poster, seen above, was...

This marvelous proto-documentary is a cultural travelogue, before such films became a conduit to express social outrage or moral condemnation. To the French filmmakers America in 1960 is still a land of wonders, a bigger-than-life fantasyland, where you can visit a places called Fantasyland and Frontierland and see your culture’s past play out as entertainment. It’s like Mondo Cane only in that it’s free-form, taking in whatever the director François Reichenbach encountered in 18 months spent wandering through the country with a Techniscope camera in tow. Helping in the journey are Michel Legrand and Chris Marker, with an assist from Frederic Rossif and Jean Cocteau … it’s class goods, a time machine to a lost Golden Age of consumerist, conformist harmony.

America as Seen by a Frenchman

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1960 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 90 min. / L’Amérique insolite / Street Date June 2, 2020 / Available from Arrow Academy 39.95

Cinematography: Marcel Grignon, Jean-Mac Ripert,...

Is Goofy a dog? That has been the question many Disney fans have been asking since 1932 when the character was first created and introduced. Luckily Bill Farmer has some insight into this mystery since he has been voicing both Goofy and Pluto for over 30 years now. Farmer has his own opinion on the matter, which he shared in a recent interview that spanned a number of topics, including why A Goofy Movie is still so incredibly popular.

When Goofy was introduced, he was known as Dippy Dawg and then Goofy. However, he has gone under a number of names over the years. George G. Geef was also used in the early cartoons and recent comics have even called him Goofus D. Dawg. But is he really a dog? Bill Farmer had this to say when asked about the mystery in a new interview.

"He is not a dog. Pluto is a dog,...

An elusive subject and a general lack of follow-up questions may frustrate viewers of “Shooting the Mafia,” a new documentary about Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia and her formative work in the 1970s on the Italian mob.

In the movie, directed by Kim Longinotto (“Shinjuku Boys”), Battaglia appears to be a colorful, but reluctant raconteur; she lets her photographs of the Sicilian mob speak for themselves, leaving a lot of room for basic questions like, “Who am I looking at in this photo, when was it taken, and what was going on when this was shot?”

Longinotto provides some context with archival clips of surrounding events; she also illustrates some of Battaglia’s more personal anecdotes with stock footage and black-and-white Italian movies that show life in small town Italy through fictional melodramas. Longinotto’s doc is, as a result, a frustratingly impersonal, though sometimes moving, portrait of an incredible artist...

Mondo is one of the more fascinating tangents to come out of ‘60s cinema; one part anthropological study, sixteen parts exploitation, these “documentaries” purported to shed light on unusual rituals and practices from around the globe. The big fun with all of them is discerning which ones actually offer up the taboo they claim and which ones are yanking the audiences’ chain. This brings us to Severin Films’ spanking new Blu-ray of two of these “shockers," Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizarro (1966), both hilarious time capsules of ‘60s exploitative wool-pulling.

Mondo Freudo was released in April, with Bizarro quickly following in August; the brainchildren of filmmakers Bob Cresse (Love Camp 7) and Lee Frost (The Thing with Two Heads), the former had seen an advanced copy of Italy’s Mondo Cane (’62) and realized it was going to be a big hit. And he was right. The biggest difference between Italy’s output and Cresse’s however,...

Those scurrilous Italian ‘mondo’ films are difficult to see in original versions; this Something Weird double bill yields an American hybrid of one of the better (?) examples, given the classy touch of a narration by George Sanders. A second oversexed pseudo-docu is a homegrown mongrel with all the credibility of today’s Reality TV — it doesn’t even try to be legit. Once again, Severin comes through with a doubly guilty pleasure, for sex-starved carnival suckers everywhere.

Ecco + The Forbidden

Blu-ray

Severin Films/Something Weird

1962/65 + 1966

Street Date January 29, 2019

29.98

Severin Films has released two Something Weird ‘Mondo’ double bills on Blu-ray, that came out on DVD thirteen years ago on the Image label. One of the few genres of exploitation film that still receives little or no serious criticism is an infestation series of opportunistic faux- documentaries borne from the massive success of 1962’s Mondo Cane. These pictures do have a...

By Adrian Smith

Shameless has released the UK video debut of the 1978 cult film The Mountain of the Cannibal God as a Blu-ray special edition. (The film is also known as The Slave of the Cannibal God.) The plot is as follows: Susan Stevenson (Ursula Andress) and her brother Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli), unable to get help from the New Guinea authorities, hire former explorer Edward Foster (Stacy Keach) to help them find her husband. He went missing months ago in the jungle whist on a quest to reach the sacred mountain of Ra Ra Me. Susan clearly loves her husband and would do anything to get him back. Foster agrees to take them, despite the obvious difficulties ahead, not only from the dangerous animals, but also from the legendary cannibal tribe said to be lurking within the darkness of the jungle canopy. Along the way they find a cult-like village...

One of the most brutal and controversial horror films of all time, Ruggero Deodato’s fake snuff movie is heavily influenced by the makers of Mondo Cane. Banned in many countries due to inexcusable animal cruelty and all-too-realistic-looking gore scenes, it has been hailed as an anti-imperialist media expose and condemned as racist torture porn. Shot on location in the Amazon with a “found footage” format, it presages both The Blair Witch Project and that most terrifying of modern horrors, The Reality Show. Nsfw...

Mondo has some eerie tunes in store for your ears this week, as they'll be releasing the vinyl scores for Wild Beasts and The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, and gamers may be pleased to know that the soundtrack for the original Castlevania video game is also back in stock:

From Mondo: "Hey All - this week we have an Italian feast for you featuring the first-ever release of animals-gone-amok score for Wild Beasts and a much asked for repress of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue. Both future the wild psychedelic art of Luke Insect who has absolutely killed it with these two releases. We also have represses of Castlevania, Streets Of Rage 2, and restocks of the Mad Max Trilogy 3Xlp and The Fly by Varese Sarabande!

As usual, new releases go on sale Wednesdays at 12Pm (Ct) at mondotees.com.

Death Waltz

Wild Beasts - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack LP.

For his sole cinematic work of the past three decades, godfather Of Mondo Franco E. Prosperi (co-creator of Mondo Cane and Goodbye Uncle Tom) took on the ‘Nature Strikes Back’ genre and delivered perhaps the most shocking movie of his controversial career… Wild Beasts.

When Pcp gets into the water supply of a city zoo, the drug-crazed beasts – including tigers, lions, cheetahs, hyenas and elephants, as well as seeing eye dogs and sewer rats – go berserk and rampage through the streets of Rome.

What follows is a terrifying mix of actual animal attacks (supervised by professional circus trainers) and over-the- top ‘80s Italian gore that remains the greatest eco-revenge shocker in EuroCult history. Lorraine De Selle (Cannibal Ferox, House at the Edge of the Park) and Ugo Bologna (Nightmare City) star in this disturbing urban bloodbath, now digitally remastered for the first time ever and bursting with all-new special features,...

They’ve focused obsessively on the lurid and even saw some directors charged for murder – yet a new season of mondo movies argues for their artistic merit

Mondo Mondo, a wide-ranging repertory series of films running at New York’s Anthology Film Archives from 22-31 July, serves up a platter of grotesque, chewy and challenging work that one would be hard-pressed to label as “entertainment” in any conventional sense.

Programmed by critic Nick Pinkerton, the series is named after a genre, the mondo film (from the Italian word for “world”), which comprised globetrotting exploitation fare crafted in pseudo-documentary style, and typically depicted sensational topics and situations. The genre itself was titled after 1962’s freewheeling Mondo Cane, one of the first films of its type, directed by the Italian film-makers who would become the genre’s keenest practitioners: Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi.

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It might be missing the industry saturated Park City fervor, but the smaller, shorter, and more intimate Columbia, Missouri based True/False Film Festival is the Rolls-Royce (by way of John Deere) of doc focused cinema. Filmmaker Laura Poitras is not alone in stating that her “love for True/False runs deep – from the smart programming, passionate audiences, inspired buskers, and fabulous venues.” Time and time again, selected filmmakers throughout this year’s edition expressed their love of the fest, while plenty of filmmaker personalities from prior editions could be spotted milling around town as casual filmgoers happy to pay to relive the experience.

With a highly curated program just shy of 50 films shown on 9 different screens (each of which are walkable in just 5-10 minutes of one another) over just 4 days, True/False centers its attention on quality and community, both locally and cinematically. For a city with a...

Is 2014 the year of the cannibal? With Eli Roth's The Green Inferno coming this September, this is a terrific time to get Grindhouse Releasing's Cannibal Holocaust 3-disc deluxe edition Blu-ray which streets July 1st. The set includes two Blu-ray discs loaded with special features, and a newly remastered soundtrack CD of the original score by Riz Ortolani (Mondo Cane).

The post Specs Revealed for Grindhouse Releasing’s Cannibal Holocaust Blu-ray appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

Guess who's on the menu tonight? People. Above is the trailer for the new Eli Roth film The Green Inferno, courtesy of Moviefone, a down-and-dirty horror film about a group of Americans who foolishly decided to visit Peru. Don't go to Peru, idiots. Nothing but cannibals there! This is actually a remake, of sorts, to 1988's Natura Contro, which also went by the titles The Green Inferno and Cannibal Holocaust II, because all the most awesome horror movies have multiple titles. It's directed by Antonio Climati, who only directed documentaries, though he served as a cinematographer for Mondo Cane, Goodbye Uncle Tom and Umberto Lenzi's Primal Rage. As an old-school horror fan who has seen Cannibal Holocaust a couple of times, I have never ever heard of Natura Contro, which apparently has no real connection to Cannibal Holocaust other than the marketing hook of the title. Like all...

Please feel free to listen to some of my favorite compositions from the late composer.

His Grammy winning and Oscar nominated song “More” from Mondo Cane.

..which lead Ruggero Deodato to hire him to compose the Cannibal Holocaust score. My first exposure to Riz Ortolani was through Cannibal Holocaust. His main theme was so beautiful that it really didn’t prepare you for the brutality that was about to unfold. His synth stings in the second video I included below echo the sharp and instinctual shocks that I experienced when viewing the violence contained in Deodato’s film while the melancholy strings would represent my afterthoughts on the haunting images and moralities that are put into question by the end of the film.

From Addio Zio Tom

From House on the Edge of the Park

From his recent appearance at the World Soundtrack Awards 2013 where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Article by Aaron AuBuchon

Television means one of two things these days: episodic, long form (usually cable) dramas- the high water mark of narrative motion media storytelling, and on the other end, the nadir, are so-called ‘reality’ shows. We are bombarded by advertisements for shows about former celebrities doing strange things, people who desperately want to be celebrities, and normal people doing insane things for money. It gets nauseating sometimes, and we like to think of this as being indicative of some new shortcoming in the moral or intellectual fabric of our times, as though the mere presence of these things points to a reduction in the cultural ideal of our society. A common misconception about these shows is that they’re a relatively new phenomenon and that they have originated out of virtual air over the last decade or so. While this may be true of television, moviegoers have...

Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of the filmmaking team of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. This pair, who invented the Mondo documentary film style in 1962 with Mondo Cane, did more to expand the concept of documentary filmmaking than any of their contemporaries, and even today their work continues to ruffle feathers. Over the next fifteen years, the pair made a series of films that pushed not only the boundaries of documentary films, but also the boundaries of European artsploitation in that same era. Following the incredible controversy and financial debacle of their statement on African colonialism, Africa Addio, they had some decisions to make. They moved away from documentaries slowly, but not without a fight. Their next film, Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye,...

The term “giallo” initially referred to cheap yellow paperbacks (printed American mysteries from writers such as Agatha Christie), that were distributed in post-fascist Italy. Applied to cinema, the genre is comprised of equal parts early pulp thrillers, mystery novels, with a willingness to gleefully explore onscreen sex and violence in provocative, innovative ways. Giallos are strikingly different from American crime films: they value style and plot over characterization, and tend towards unapologetic displays of violence, sexual content, and taboo exploration. The genre is known for stylistic excess, characterized by unnatural yet intriguing lighting techniques, convoluted plots, red herrings, extended murder sequences, excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. Amidst the ‘creative kill’ set-pieces are thematic undercurrents along with a whodunit element, usually some sort of twist ending. Here is my list of the best giallo films – made strictly by Italian directors, so don’t expect Black Swan, Amer or...

Mike Patton, moved by the Paolo Giordano novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers and having contributed music to the movie of the same name, has created a 16-track release that boasts some of the most contemplative and stirring music of his multi-faceted career with Mike Patton describing the release as a personal "sonic departure." The album, titled Music From The Film and Inspired By the Book The Solitude of Prime Numbers (La Solitudine Dei Numeri Primi), has been set for a 11-1-11 release via Ipecac Recordings.

Where Mike Patton's projects (Fant&#244mas, Mondo Cane, Tomahawk) often thrive on abrupt transitions and multi-layered instrumentation, The Solitude of Prime Numbers collection boasts a cinematic feel that allows instruments an individual voice, emphasizes isolated notes and subtly transitions from piece to piece, acutely capturing the introspective and reflective feel of the novel. The album's intricate packaging further conveys this dramatic and minimalistic approach,...

Who’s hungry?

One of the most brutal and controversial horror films of all time, Ruggero Deodato’s fake snuff movie is heavily influenced by the makers of Mondo Cane. Banned in many countries due to inexcusable animal cruelty and all-too-realistic-looking gore scenes, it has been hailed as an anti-imperialist media expose and condemned as racist torture porn. Shot on location in the Amazon with a “found footage” format, it presages both The Blair Witch Project and that most terrifying of modern horrors, The Reality Show.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Just for posterity:

And, of course, the whole “found footage” angle has become quite a thing in modern horror film making (there’s one opening this weekend!); I’m still largely baffled by the phenomenon. It occasionally makes sense; it’s occasionally great. (Find Troll Hunter as a recent success).

Mostly though, the genre doesn’t really work for me.

Getting in touch with out inner Italians.

On Monday, August 29, join Mark Goldblatt for the trailer to City of the Living Dead.

Also known as The Gates of Hell (among other titles), this gruesome entry is the first of a loose Lucio Fulci trilogy including The Beyond and The House By the Cemetery. When the Gates of Hell are opened, hordes of ravenous levitating zombies are unleashed and reporter Christopher George has to travel to Lovecraft’s Dunwich to close the portal before All Saint’s Day. Ace editor and sometimes director Mark Goldblatt makes his Trailers from Hell debut.

On Wednesday, August 31, join David Decoteau for the trailer to Beyond the Door.

Ovidio Assonitis (credited as Oliver Hellman) directed this popular Exorcist rip-off, which inspired an unsuccessful lawsuit from Warner Bros. An open season of further Exorcist copies followed at home and abroad, but this was the trailblazer. Pregnant...

Italian creator of the satirical film Mondo Cane and its 'shockumentary' successors

When the Italian film director Gualtiero Jacopetti, who has died at the age of 91, made Mondo Cane (A Dog's Life) in 1962, he tapped into people's curiosity and provided the strangest commercially successful film in the history of cinema. Audiences not yet accustomed to cheap air travel or the idea of globalisation were unprepared for its colourful National Geographic-style montages of "primitive" rites and "civilised" wrongs. The following year, they flocked to see the film's sequels, Mondo Pazzo (Mad World, or Mondo Cane No 2) and La Donna nel Mondo (Women of the World).

Mondo Cane was a film made out of a compilation of pithy sequences depicting strange rituals from around the globe. But while Jacopetti documented the peculiarities of what was then described as the third world, he also mocked the alleged superiority of western culture. The...

"'Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart': Filmic Horror, Popular Religion and the Spectral Underside of History," an essay that appeared in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture in 2005, piqued Michael Guillén's interest in its author, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, "a native Montrealer and 'monster kid' who teaches courses on genre cinema and monsters in the Humanities department of John Abbott College." So they met up a few weeks ago at the Fantasia International Film Festival and Michael's transcription of their conversation — touching on national identities, filmmakers who straddle the high and the low, "the knowledge systems of ordinary people" and more — is one of the week's best reads, which is why I wanted to point it out right at the top of this little roundup of horror-related items.

The splashiest of these will surely be Jason Zinoman's survey of "a diverse collection of filmmakers about the scariest movie they'd...

Along with fellow documentarians Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, Italian filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti helped to birth the exploitation cinema genre known as the mondo film, which took off following the success of their 1962 shockumentary classic Mondo Cane. Jacopetti, aged 92, died this week in Rome; his most provocative films include Africa Addio and Addio zio Tom (Goodbye, Uncle Tom), the latter of which happens to earn a nod in a certain upcoming Ryan Gosling automotive thriller opening next month.

The annual Cine-Excess festival is a both an academic conference in which the world’s gore whores descend upon London to wax lyrical about cinema’s darkest hours, and an opportunity for fans to meet their heroes and watch extreme cinema in a darkened auditorium as nature intended.

This year Cannibal Holocaust, a notorious, banned shocker that fell foul of UK censors on its original release for realistic depictions of human slaughter and animal snuff, because we don’t like the little qweetuers being hurt, was showing in a new BBFC sanctioned cut, with a mere 15 second excised to keep the film in line with the country’s strict rules on animal cruelty.

Following the screening I was able to spend half an hour in the company of its vilified author. Ruggero Deodato may be celebrating his opus now, but back in the day it was no laughing matter. The Italian authorities,...

Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dali in Paul Morrison's Little Ashes (top); João Gabriel Vasconcellos, Rafael Cardoso as brothers in love in Aluízio Abranches' From Beginning to End (bottom) image+nation 2010 – Montreal's Gay & Lesbian Film Festival: Undertow, Le Fil "In response to the cinematic watershed of Lgbt-themed films from South America and Spain in the past year," explains the image+nation press release, the 2010 edition of Montreal's Lgbt film festival will present “Mundo Hispanico.” Countries represented in "Mundo Hispanico" are Spain, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil — where people speak Portuguese, not Spanish. But hey, were I a Brazilian filmmaker I'd be happy to have my movie included in any film festival sidebar, be it Mundo Hispanico, Mundo Mongolico, or Mondo Cane. If people showed up to check out my movie, that'd be all I'd care about. (How about "Mundo Ibérico" for next time, which could then include some Portuguese cinematic...

By Pete Hammond

HollywoodNews.com: Box office-wise this will probably be known as the week that clearly marked the decline of western civilization. With its near stunning $50 million gross Paramount’s scatological gross-out epic “Jackass 3D” exceeded expectations on about the same level as it managed to exceed any expectation of taste. The enthusiastic public reception to this third chapter in Johnny Knoxville and gang’s low brow exercise in vomit-inducing bodily pranks probably says more about what audiences crave than it does about the “filmmakers” who serve it all up in gut-blasting 3D. Want to see a dildo fly right into your face? This is the place. Want to watch a fat guy running on a treadmill wrapped in cellophane producing ‘sweat cocktails’ for adventurous drinkers? Line up now. Want to check out a hungry pig named Bob trying to extract an apple from the same fat guy’s rear end?...

Specialty label Kritzerland today announced the CD release of Les Baxter's music for the cult film Sadismo. From the Press Release:In 1962 a documentary called Mondo Cane was unleashed on the world and became a box-office sensation. The film was such a huge success that it spawned its own genre – the mondo film, and soon everyone was rushing out their own mondo shock docs – Mondo Cane 2, Malamondo, Women of the World, Africa Addio, Addio Zio Tom, and some really low-budget knockoffs like Mondo Bizarro and Mondo Hollywood. A latecomer to the game was 1967&rsquo...

The Event? Whoop-doo!

The Event? Keep it coming! New series. Airs Monday nights at 9/8 central on NBC. Episode 1.02: Keep Us Safe airs September 27th.

What is The Event? Certain characters know, but the writers of this show aren't telling. Not yet. Though, they claim we'll know soon enough. Apparently it involves a giant ball of blue phlegm that is spit forth from the heavens above. One that is capable of swallowing airliners whole. And Laura Innes, who is spoken to in a manner only befitting an alien presence from space definitely has something to do with it. But who or what is she? Only time will tell in this eager jolt of itchy anticipation.

The Event is a jittery child that doesn't sit down long enough for us to get comfortable with it. It herks and jerks between various months, giving us little snippets of the past; images only complicated by the immediate future.

It's safe to say that books about cult cinema are a dime a dozen - but fans of the genre are either treated to short blurbs about their favorite films in an all-to expensive compendium or cheap and chintzy titles that seem hastily put together. Small press publishers like Creation Books have been tapping into this niche market for years - printing specialized books that mass market publishers won't touch because of their transgressive subject matter and because they don't feel they have a huge audience.

Fans of mondo/death flicks like 'Mondo Cane' and 'Faces of Death' may be familiar with Creation's 'Killing for Culture' - published in 1996, this remains the definitive title for fans of the subgenre. Their film studies line of books has covered an array of topics on experimental, underground, and erotic cinema. Now comes Creation's 'Persistence of Vision' series - a limited edition (100 copies,...

Bizarre horror The Human Centipede may be shocking audiences everywhere but, as Nick explains, mondo cinema has been doing the same thing since the 60s...

In a week that sees the release of the much talked about The Human Centipede, it seems only right that I talk about the weirder side of World Cinema. After-all, it is a fact I have mentioned several times over the last ten weeks. It is the unknown that draws us to seek out different cultures' cinema, and more often than not, it is the less salubrious unknown which intrigues and interests, or otherwise repulses.

Not long ago, I discussed shock tactics in cinema and I can only reiterate those points again. Shocking scenes make people talk about a film and, over time, can even shape perception of an entire culture's cinema. But while the odd scene here and there, or even a shocking premise,...

Fans of classic Italian genre movie scores, especially the works of legendary composer Ennio Morricone, have a kindred spirit in multi-talented artist Mike Patton – former Faith No More vocalist and the creative force behind supremely twisted bands like Fantomas, Mr. Bungle and Peeping Tom. Patton's passion for the works of Morricone and other maestros comes into play with the arrival of Mondo Cane (which itself takes its title from the Italian shockumentary that started a decades-long cult cinema trend). Find out more about the album and hear Mike belt out a classic tune after the jump! Recorded live during a series of European performances (including a classy outdoor concert in Northern Italy), the eleven-track CD...

Mondo Macabro's new DVD double-feature of Sadist with Red Teeth (1970) and Forbidden Paris (1969) is a real head scratcher. Director Jean Louis van Belle is an obscure French director who created numerous ultra low-budget films in various genres, including horror and mondo. These avant-weird productions invoke familiar Eurocult reference points but Jean Louis van Belle was coming from an entirely different angle than his genre brethren.

Sadist with the Red Teeth combines the psychedelic horror vibe of Jess Franco and Jean Rolling with the experimentalist sensibilities of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. Yes, that prior statement was made in earnest. In the film, a mad doctor convinces a comic book artist (Daniel Moosman) who experiences a car accident that he is a vampire. As a result of his psychocis, the main character is given to episodic freakouts in which he dons joke-shop vampire fangs and attacks people. The brief synopsis basically...

When it comes to movies about racism, Goodbye Uncle Tom is the nastiest, most provocative and all-around angering one I’ve ever come across. It’s unrelenting in its portrayal of the inhumanity that goes on during America’s most troubling chapter. The DVD cover’s tagline says, “Makes Roots look like The Jeffersons!” I initially pegged that as a cheeky sell line. It turns out that it was being completely truthful. Goodbye Uncle Tom is like Roots, if Roots was directed by the Italian guys who did Mondo Cane.

The premise itself is nutty. Unlike most Mondo films, which are actual documentaries, Goodbye Uncle Tom is strictly reenactments (for obvious reasons), but still presents itself as a documentary. The assumption is that the filmmakers travel from present day Italy to 18th century Southern states and brought a camera along (references to a time machine is made vague), interviewing white...

At the time of its release Cannibal Holocaust was seized by authorities across the world and prosecuted under obscenity, animal cruelty and (potential) murder charges. Quite a collection of accolades. Many were convinced something more repugnant than senseless animal slaughter had gone on – real murder! Its director, Ruggero Deodato, had to bring his quartet of actors onto Italian television to prove he hadn’t done away with them, in the name of cinema, deep in the Amazon jungle. There were casualties: several animals, insects and careers. Like the film’s ravenous cannibals – film censor’s cut it to shreds – or it was banned it outright on legal grounds. In other countries such as Germany and Japan (what does this tell us?) it was a box office smash.

It has been almost-thirty years since its explosive debut in Milan. Deodato has continued working after his brief time in jail; Luca Barbareschi...

Curious to know what frightful films and devilish discs will be available to view in the privacy of your own digital dungeon this week? Fango's got you covered.

Below the jump you'll find the full list of titles arriving in-stores this Tuesday, July 14, 2009 in our weekly version of the famous Fangoria Chopping List - updated with all the last-minute additions and deletions.

Presented with "branching" coverage with trailers, interviews, and reviews for select titles!

Note: Clickable links lead to Amazon.com

Asalto Violento (Traumatized, 1993) - Distrimax

Robert Smith is an outstanding doctor, devoted to teaching at a local university in Mexico City. During a trip to Vietnam he suffers a violent assault at the hands of a group of terrorists while he was being intimated with a local girl. After his arrival he discovers that he has contracted an incurable disease; traumatized by the attack and his illness, he will...