Mondo Cane (1962, It.) (aka A Dog's World)

This popular Italian-made globe-trotting, amateurish "shockumentary" or "antidocumentary" was luridly advertised as a travelogue of "truth stranger than fiction" - with xenophobic glimpses of dark-skinned, bare 'savages' engaged in grotesque and bizarre religious rituals, tribal ceremonies, many scenes of animal abuse and cruelty, and lurid scenes of human perversity!

It inspired a series of sequel "Mondo" films (or "shockumentaries") and dozens of imitators, including Rolf Olsen's Shocking Asia (1974) and Conan Le Cilaire's Faces of Death, Part 1 (1978) series of films. It was the progenitor of "snuff" films, execution videos, hard-core pornography, and even reality TV.

The film was castigated as pornographic, trashy and vulgar for its taboo subject matter, although by today's standards, the offensive scenes would be considered extremely tame. Allegedly real scenes were often intermixed with faked, reconstructed or manipulated footage (with misleading narration):

• in the US, Italian actor and film-star Rossano Brazzi (as Himself) was surrounded by eager females to rip off his shirt and acquire his autograph; similarly, man-chasing (or man-hunting) was conducted by bare-breasted native girls in the Trobriand Islands; this was contrasted with a busty bikini-clad female followed by US sailors, who also oogled other swimsuit-clad gals in a speed-boat on the Riviera flaunting their chests
• a New Guinea native female who lost a child was breast-feeding an orphaned piglet
• a brutal mass pig-slaughtering, roasting and feast by natives in New Guinea was held every five years
• a wealthy pet cemetery (Pet Haven Cemetery for mourning pet lovers) in Pasadena, CA was contrasted with caged dogs and the eating of roasted dogmeat in open-air restaurants in Taipei, Taiwan
• hundreds of young chicks were dyed in different colors for Easter in Rome, although many died during the drying procedure
• in Strasbourg (the fois gras capital of the world), over a half-million geese were subjected to a torturous force-feeding treatment (through a mechanized funnel) before being processed
• a calf-breeding farm in Japan with masseurs who massaged the animals to tenderize their very expensive, specialized Wagyu meat for exclusive restaurants in Japan and NY; each calf was fed six bottles of beer a day (directly from the bottles) to fatten them, contrasted with the force-feeding of decorated New Guinea native girls in the island group of Tabar for six months with tapioca to make them more marriageable and fertile for a skinny yet very potent dictatorial leader - and compared to western weight-loss techniques in Los Angeles (Vic Tanny gym equipment exercises, rotating weight-loss machines, group dancing, etc.)
• laundry was hanging from multi-level apartment buildings, above where hungry Chinese crowded open-air markets in Hong Kong, selling crocodiles, toads, serpents, turtles, and lizards; similarly, the exclusive Colony restaurant in NYC served exotic and expensive lunch delicacies to the elite rich, such as canned bees, lava worms, fried ants, stuffed beetle, butterfly eggs, musk rat, rattlesnake, etc.
• in Singapore, Malaysia where snake was the national dish, housewives would bargain with vendors for just the right squirming reptile that was skinned alive under a watchful eye
• on St. Dominic's Day in Cocullo, Italy, a folklore festival-procession was held every year to honor the Saint who rid the town of venomous viper snakes in the 11th century; participants in the parade were adorned with live snakes
• bloody self-flagellation and self-punishment of one's legs (with cork hammers and glass shards) were observed among devout Catholic penitents on Good Friday as an annual rite in the small southern town of Nocera Terinese in Italy, to exalt the flagellation of Christ
• on its 10th anniversary, teenaged girl lifeguards of the Life Savers Girls Assocation paraded on the streets of Sydney, Australia before arriving at Manly Beach to conduct staged drowning rescues of young males and the practice of CPR for the viewing public
• in the film's most tragic and sad sequence, animal life was profoundly changed by the environmental catastrophe and contamination due to the effects of radiation and nuclear atomic testing on the small islands of Bikini Atoll; dead butterflies drifted on the ocean surface; some fish evacuated from the ocean, migrated and began to live in trees, while some birds hid underground and laid their eggs; many thousands of eggs from different species would never hatch; sea turtles also lost their sense of direction during egg-laying season and would perish in the sun
• natives in the Malaysian archipelago was an immense underwater cemetery littered with human skulls; each night after a funeral, sharks would be attracted to the fresh corpses and human flesh and became man-eaters; some of the poor local fishermen in a coastal village would then hunt the sharks, but some were disabled, maimed or lost limbs by the voracious fish; sun-dried shark fins would be sold to Chinese communities inland for their alleged aphrodisiac powers; some vengeful locals sought to torture and cause a week of suffering for cannibalistic sharks with a poisonous sea urchin inserted into their throat
• in Rome, a cemetery of the Capuchin Friars has now been turned into a museum, where one macabre section of skeletal remains from nearly 4,000 friars (from the 16th-19th centuries), that were collected and artfully decorated and costumed in a crypt; similarly, an Italian group known as the Fraternity of the Red Hoods (or Sacks) was formed in the 1700s on Taberina Island, with a mission to maintain and guard another crypt-cemetery; each week, families including children would assist in cleaning the skulls and bones; in contrast, in a German beerhouse in Hamburg, in the St. Pauli district on the Reeperbahn, patrons drank beer and celebrated life (dancing, romancing, getting drunk, etc.)
• an exercise-bathhouse-massage parlor in Tokyo, Japan was specifically for drunken men who needed to alleviate their hangovers, and was populated with women in bras and shorts
• in Macao (a territory in China), corpses were made-up for their funerals, with offerings of food, and money that was burned to accompany the dead to the afterlife
• in Singapore and in all of Malaysia heavily populated with Chinese, a "House of Death" (hotel or boarding house) was established for the dying, as others outside awaited their deaths while feasting; dancers also urged on the gods to take the dying
• in the Los Angeles metropolis, in an automobile graveyard-junkyard (or 'death house') or cemetery, cars were spiked or picked up and deposited in crushing machines that converted them into cubes; cubes were recycled in Europe for future smaller automobiles, although some cubes were even sold as pieces of modern artwork in Paris
• in Czechoslovakia, nude women covered in bright blue paint ("human paint brushes") threw themselves at a canvas to make modern art paintings for French artist Yves Klein
• hula dancing and leis were presented as cruise travelers and tourists disembarked in Honolulu, Hawaii; other tourists watched the performances of hula and Hawaiian music in the popular Kodak hula show
• in Nepal, fierce soldiers (Gurkhas) performed two rituals during a national holiday - (1) the commemoration of the beheading execution of 300 Gurkhas POWs by the Japanese in WWII by having the soldiers cross-dress as women, and (2) the gruesome beheading of live bulls cheered on by audiences
• in Portugal, the running of a bull and bull-fighting in the arena were conducted, resulting in deaths and many injuries
• New Guinea natives in Goroka worshipped in a western Catholic church service, and received communion wafers while kneeling at the altar
• indigenous tribal peoples in Papua, New Guinea were part of a cargo cult ("the cult of the cargo planes") that worshipped airplanes and related structures (landing strip and control tower) that they believed came from Paradise

Dogmeat in Taipei	Chicks Being Dyed	Fattening Up Native Girls Before Marriage
Self-Flagellation in Italy	Japanese Massage Parlor-Bathouse for Drunken Men	Natives Worshipping During Catholic Church Communion