5. Mondo Movies
Because without Mondo movies we would be without Death Scenes 4! Basically, Mondo movies are documentaries which trade on showing shocking and lurid behaviour and customs from around the world. The first Mondo movie (which the sub genre was named after and which started the whole craze) was Mondo Cane (literally It's A Dog's World) which was directed by Franco Prosperi and Gaultiero Jacopetti. The world went crazy for the Mondo movie but the most iconic Mondo movies come from Italy. Jacopetti and Prosperi quickly threw out Mondo Cane 2 which featured lots of staged footage of people doing daft and bizarre things. This would come to be one of the hallmarks of the Mondo film - staged footage. Jacopetti and Prosperi were to provide two further highly controversial Mondo films - Africa Addio and Addio Zio Tom. Africa Addio is an examination of what happened in Africa during and after decolonisation in the early 1960s. Uncompromising viewing, the directors were accused of staging murders for the camera and narrowly escaped jail time in Italy. It is an extraordinarily nasty film to watch. I have only managed to watch it twice. The free for all animal slaughter is so gratuitous, I am pretty sure it was staged by the directors, so shame on them. There is also lots of the killing of peoples which is even more unpleasant plus a racist narrative which in one critic's words "slanders an entire continent". Addio Zio Tom is possibly even more offensive than Africa Addio. It goes back in history to times of African American slavery and restages what indignities the slaves had to suffer. This could have been a respectable retrospective of slavery, but because the directors are Prosperi and Jacopetti, it is a grotesque, repulsive carnival of slurs against African Americans - using the suffering of the slaves as titillation for the viewer. Utterly jaw dropping. Franco and Prosperi were not the only Italian Mondo directors of note. The Castiglioni Brothers were notable for their ultra gruesome and virtually unwatchable documentaries about Africa such as Shocking Africa and The Last Savage. Antonio Climati, who had worked for Prosperi and Jacopetti, decided to throw in his lot with the Mondo movie and produced three extraordinary movies - Savage Man, Savage Beast, This Violent World and Sweet and Savage. It has to be said that the most shocking scenes in Climati's films are usually staged recreations. By the late 1970s, audiences were getting jaded and this is when the Mondo movie became what it is today. No longer an explanation or exploitation of world cultures, but a relentless stream of people caught dying on camera, autopsies, suicides and everything to do with dying. This craze was kicked off by Faces of Death which spawned dozens of unsavoury imitators. Ciao Mondo film!