Les derniers cris de la savane

Savage Man...Savage Beast (1975)

** (out of 4)

Italian Mondo movie has all that you'd expect from a film like this. This "documentary" shows everything from cannibals to animal killings to hippies cleaning themselves at an outdoor event. If you're an animal lover then it goes without saying that you should skip this film because all sorts of animals are show being killed and slaughtered. Some of these are animal on animal attacks but there's a lot of footage of men hunting down the animals and killing them. The most outrageous scene comes from an African tribe who believe they must have sex with the ground in order to get the grass to grow. Seeing twenty some men drilling holes in the ground and then having sex with it is something I really didn't need to see. This film isn't a well made movie but it's remains slightly interesting just by seeing these different cultures.

Mostly lame Mondo about man's relationship with nature and animals, might have been more shocking in the 1970s, but now it seems like various outtakes leftover from a few National Geographic specials.

Tribesmen on the hunt in footage showing real animal death juxtaposed with hippie shenanigans was both repulsive and silly. Tourist being mauled by lions in Angola was fake, but at least it was better staged than the similar scene in Faces Of Death.

A curious vignette allegedly in Burundi mentions a tribe called Niamey , and a pair of brothers named Kano and Naro Kabila- which is odd, because Niamey is in Niger, and Kabila has roots in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not Burundi.

The narrator in Faces Of Death was silly and largely false, but at least he was more charismatic and amusing than the dry, flat, monotone narrator heard here.

Guys let's not get carried away here! There are no human death scenes in this, or any Faces of Death for that matter. It's all staged, and all psychological.

They show you a dead body in a morgue,or real animals getting brutally killed. Then show you a guy getting shot by executioners (not in this film,in one of the Faces of Death and I'm just using as an example only),a guy hit by a train, or a guy mauled by lions. Because you saw the real dead body you think every thing else is real. People see these films usually very young, and grow up believing they are real. They are not. There is no debate as others here have stated.

However if you have never seen one of these film, think very long and hard about how much you really do. Even though the human deaths are fake these films are still very unsettling, and you can not unwatch it. It will be with you for the rest of your life, and you will be affected by them.

What I like in this doco is a volume of realistic data rarely seen somewhere else.

DVD I own accomplishes 88 min of 94 minutes a full version presents, and some film scenes are really cut short with censoring in "a free speech world", leaving more to viewer's imagination than it was probably supposed by producers themselves.

With knowledge of a subject and respect, a natural beauty of hunters' bodies have been depicted while broadening viewers' knowledge of a rough reality of a world existing in different time/space dimensions on the Earth simultaneously to civilised digitally-equipped one, by screening a variety of traditional indigenous African rituals, much more logical and cognitive with environment than outdoor copulating of the educated Westerners during youth gatherings.

A scene of annihilating "primitives" of Amazon is uselessly censored perhaps as shoving a member cut off might really emphasised a notion of this work, which is, as understood, convincing in "devil beneath" that is in killing ground of a human nature although lacquered upon the history with challenging laws and orders but well preserved and easily demonstrated on demand of circumstances requiring.

A must to have on a shelf.

This film was not only great but also absolutely repulsive, which I love. The scene where a man is mauled by three hungry lions is very graphic. There are also some scenes where a hippie is breast feeding a goat. Has to be seen to be believed. I gave it a ten