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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...

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...

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...

Stare at the magnificent poster, and then read the official announcement of what the greatest film festival in the world is up to at the end of September.

Fantastic Fest announces the first wave programming lineup for its 11th annual celebration of exciting genre-bending films, including the World Premiere of Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox in attendance, a retrospective of Turkish Genre Cinema, and a special Mondo Gallery event and programming series curated by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn to celebrate the release of his new book Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing, which profiles Refn’s collection of vintage exploitation-era American movie posters. “We’re very excited about this year’s mix of premieres, unique events and a retrospective theme unlike any other featuring audacious and otherworldly Turkish remakes of classic Hollywood films,” said Fantastic Fest founder Tim League.

See the full list of first...

Fantastic Fest is touted as the largest genre film fest, from experience, I can tell you the Austin week-long event still feels like an intimate gathering, for fans who love of horror, sci-fi, experimental, foreign, action, animated and just straight-up gnarly film. The curtain has rolled back on this year's first wave of programming at the Alamo Drafthouse fest, held Sept. 24 through Oct. 1 at the South Lamar location. Highlights include the world premiere of Kurt Russell-starrer "Bone Tomahawk"; a retrospective of Turkish genre cinema; and a programming series from "Drive" and "Only God Forgives" director Nicolas Winding Refn, who will be supporting his new book "Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing." There are a few films that are crossing over with other major film fest lineups, like one-take flick "Victoria" which took home awards from Berlinale International. The initial film lineup for Fantastic Fest 2015 is below it's new poster,...

The day has come. The reminder that Autumn is nearing and the best genre film festival in the Magnited States of America is nigh! We got the poster and the first wave of films listed below. Nicolas Winding Refn comes back and curates some obscure films and motherfuckin’ Kurt F’n Russell is coming with his new film, Bone Tomahawk! Read below and prepare for our coverage of this year’s Fantastic Fest!!!!

From the Press Release:

Austin, TX – Thursday, July 30, 2015 – Fantastic Fest announces the first wave programming lineup for its 11th annual celebration of exciting genre-bending films, including the World Premiere of Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox in attendance, a retrospective of Turkish Genre Cinema, and a special Mondo Gallery event and programming series curated by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn to celebrate the release of his new book Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing,...

As genre cinema has found more fans around the world, their place in film festivals have also grown, with genre getting its dedicated sections in acclaimed festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section. The demand, however, has grown now to allow for festivals dedicated to genre cinema, and one of the more notable stops in the latter group is Fantastic Fest. Running for a decade now, the 2015 incarnation of Fantastic Fest will be held once again in Austin, Texas, running from September 24th to October 1st. The first wave of films that will play at the festival have now been announced.

The Festival’s closing night film will be S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, which will be making its World Premiere. Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox, who star in the feature, will also be in attendance at the festival. The 2015 Festival will also have...

Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, and more star in the horror Western Bone Tomahawk, the closing film of Fantastic Fest 2015. Karyn Kusama's The Invitation is also included in the first wave of programming for the Austin-based festival that kicks off September 24th.

Press Release: "Austin, TX - Thursday, July 30, 2015 - Fantastic Fest announces the first wave programming lineup for its 11th annual celebration of exciting genre-bending films, including the World Premiere of Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox in attendance, a retrospective of Turkish Genre Cinema, and a special Mondo Gallery event and programming series curated by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn to celebrate the release of his new book Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing, which profiles Refn's collection of vintage exploitation-era American movie posters. "We're very excited about this year's mix of premieres, unique events and a retrospective theme unlike any other featuring audacious and...

Home Invasion is a weekly post every Tuesday which shows you what is being released on Blu-Ray & DVD today! We scoured through Amazon to bring you everything you might be interested in. Our Picks of the Week are releases that we are looking forward to checking out, have reviewed and/or were are Picks of the Week on the Dtb Podcast. All descriptions are courtesy of Amazon.com.

Price: $32.61

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Over the course of a single day, Monsieur Oscar travels by limousine around Paris to a series of nine appointments, transforming into new characters at each stop. He is a captain of industry, a gypsy beggar, a digitized ninja warrior (and reptilian sex god!), a gibberish-spewing troglodyte, the melancholy father of a teenage daughter, a shadowy assassin, a dying old man, and a thwarted lover reuniting with a past flame.

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,...

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.