"Death Scenes 3" (1993) d/ Nick Bougas

...And then there's the third in Nick Bougas' shockumentary series, the aptly-named Death Scenes 3, or if you're following along on dvd, Death Scenes 2 (It seems that the folks at Anthem Pictures have done us all solid and mixed up the numbers when releasing the set on disc, with Death Scenes 2 being touted as the first, the third as the second, and the first as the third...confused yet? Well, at least you aren't nauseous. That'll probably come later.). Lots more attention is paid to the art of dying, and all the various ways a person can begin to do so for themselves, but at the risk of giving too much away, too early in the review, allow me to relate that sometimes, as is the case here, more really means less. Onward...


Vasilisa reacts to seeing her first Che Guevara t-shirt from the West.
If watching shabby black and white footage of charred baby corpses being chucked onto flatbed trucks while babushka-ed up Russian broads weep unconsolably  amid sub-zero temperatures is your bag, then you'll dig the introductory segment of tonight's review, which...surprise! focuses on war atrocities captured on camera in Russia, Peru, Bosnia, and Poland, among others, with lots of unpleasantly grotesque remains displaying their best frozen, sardonic death-grins, photographed for your pleasure. Next, we blow the dust off of a 1945 newsreel of a lifeless Mussolini strung up upside down next to his equally dead mistress, Clara Petracci, by a mob of angry Milanese partisans that some of us may have seen before, at some point. After some blurry firing squad footage, we see the Ceausescu's frantically plead for their lives before being stood up against a wall and mowed down like a couple of boisterous Romanian dandelions. Then some highway patrolmen face armed resistance with varying degrees of success (one shoots his attacker, the other gets iced) via well-placed dashcam. After which, we see an ex-husband empty a clip into his former spouse's skullpiece on Spanish television, and the father of a molested boy puts the responsible nonce down with a bullet behind the ear, at an airport, for his kiddy-fiddling ways.


In Russia,  my little lyubimiy, head gives you.
Then, it's back to aging newsreels, as we see King Alexander of France rue forgetting to wear his kevlar vest that fateful day. Algerian terrorist bombs lead us to a segment dealing with accidents and disasters: faulty hot air balloons, suicide jumpers during high rise fires, fighter jet crashes, and massive runaway logs rolling over helpless Japanese spectators, before the documentary switches gears again. What about monstrous, birth defected, stillborn freak-children in jars, you ask? Oh, there's quite a collection of fascinating-looking little mistakes for the viewer to gawk at, here. Forensic images follow, with some slit necks, gun-blasted headpieces, burn victims, and mummified corpses offered up. A drowned Otis Redding is fished out of the bay, and we're then treated to the same crime scene and morgue table photographs of the Manson murders that we were shown in Part 2. Next, Jim Jones serves his followers, thirsty for the afterlife, some grape-flavored cyanide ("Oh YEAH!") before things are wrapped up neatly with an entire washed out instructional film on autopsy from the sixties. Though an electric saw to remove the skull cap is less time-consuming, remember, a hand saw is more solicitous, especially if an infectious process is suspected within the cranium. Thanks, Death Scenes 3.


You can always dye him blue and use him as a Game of Life token...
Far and away the weakest in the series, this third entry mostly compiles footage borrowed from earlier mondo documentaries like Africa addio (1966), well-traveled newsreels that nobody'd ever describe as recent, hell, it even borrows rehashed footage from it's own first two entries, ferchrissakes. Some of the less ancient clips also ended up in 1994's straight to video release,  L.A. Gang Violence, but you've seen one tearful Crip spilling malt liquor on the concrete as memorial to his dead homie, you've pretty much seen 'em all, haven't you? Though many of the lesser, snooze-worthy real death shockumentaries of the era would resort to grainy, recycled footage (Death in Focus, Death Faces, Inhumanities, et al), I'd come to expect more (less?) from this series, after being lulled by two sickeningly stellar examples of the shockumentary sub-genre. I guess, in the mad rush to release a third effort,  the producers ignored their lack of remaining material and went ahead and gave us this. Completists might want it for their genre shelves, but it's nothing special. Two wops.


You're gonna wanna check on yours after watching this one, to make sure it isn't damaged by the experience.

"Death Scenes 2" (1992) d/ Nick Bougas

Just to let you know, rather than really exploring the depraved depths of my usual brand of black humor, I took the highest possible road where the screenshots are concerned for tonight's review, as is usually the case with every "real death" documentary there's plenty of opportunity for hardcore bleeeech, and director Nick Bougas' follow-up to his 1989 epic direct-to-home-video release takes full advantage of every single friggin' one here, lovingly serving up notorious famous death footage not just once, or even twice in slow-mo, but  frame by brutal frame detail of the carnage in one particular case... I can still remember the night they stocked this one on the shelves at one of my local video haunts on 'the Ave', I snagged it, and when I returned it, I ordered an original copy for myself straight away, having been much more of a serial killer/real death/shockumentary completist kinda guy back then, as unsettling as that probably sounds to some of you. I say 'some', because Death Scenes remains one of the top ten most viewed reviews of all-time here at the Wop. Go figure...


Show me all the horrible footage and pictures you want, just don't let Anton sing 'Golden Earrings' again...
After a gruesome recap of the first video for those that missed it, it isn't long before the screen is engulfed with the horrors of war, and WWII is well represented, as usual, with photographs of battle-maimed soldiers and footage of smoldering corpses hanging out of tanks as the norm. Next, the focus is 1950s-era death, with teenage hot rodders, drunk drivers, and road hogs meeting fiery ends in several graphic high school driver's ed films of the day. Death doesn't bypass Tinsel Town either, as we soon find out, and the deaths of Hollywood stars like Tyrone Power, Bela Lugosi, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, and Elvis Presley are touched upon, usually accompanied by grim morgue table, crime scene, and/or casket photographs. Dying naked on a bathroom floor with a syringe still in your arm hardly constitutes "glamorous" in my book... During the segment on the tumultuously groovy decade that followed, after some Vietnam footage and race riots, we're introduced to the crimes of Albert DeSalvo, Richard Speck, and the Manson family, with crime scene photos and autopsy slab shots of all of the Tate-LaBianca victims included.


"B.W. is my favorite movie reviewer on the internet, and my favorite candy is barbiturates."- Marilyn Monroe 
While the focus remains on serial killers, John Wayne Gacy is discussed, and even the sickening contents of Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer's bathtub and refrigerator are shown briefly. Then it's back to Hollywood where actor Vic Morrow and two Asian child actors tragically lost their lives on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie during the night filming of one of director John Landis' segments, when a helicopter loses control due to misfired pyrotechnics, and spirals down, killing all three instantly. If the horrible accident was difficult to make out from the initial camera angle, rest easy, there's two more to choose from, including a close up that's slowed down to frame by frame analysis. We close with a well upsetting montage of gore from the video era that includes suicide jumpers, mass bombings, Pa State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer's televised .357 suicide in it's entirety, gory color Mexican newspaper photos and footage, and even a late-term abortion. Stay classy, Death Scenes 2...


Get those kids to safety, Vic, in case that helicopter is forced to make an emergency Landis...errr, landing. Sorry.
As nauseating as this series can be (and usually is), tonight's review in particular, they've been long since surpassed by internet access, where you can sate the most morbid of your curiosities, and watch mankind outdo itself in terms of brutality and violence, worldwide, on a daily basis, if that's your bag. It certainly isn't everybody's, and those who are easily affected by such imagery and subject matter should obviously steer as clear of this one as possible. On the other hand, it stands as a frank reminder of how unchanged we remain as a species, despite our self-awareness and general belief that we occupy a higher rung of the scala naturae than the other life forms on the planet. If you share in that particular belief, watching Death Scenes 2 just might force you to reconsider your position. Four Wops.


"For my next trick, I'm going to put an embezzler's brain to sleep..."

"Africa ama " (1971) d/ Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, Guido Guerrasio, Oreste Pellini

The nastiness continues...Let's season our month of Italian genre cinema here at the Wop with a mondo documentary from the notorious Castiglioni brothers, Alfredo and Angelo, who would later bring you the famously foul Addio ultimo uomo, aka/The Last Savage (1978), a pair that probably never once flinched in exploiting the dark continent during their prolific partnership, as titles Africa segreta(1969), Magia Nuda (1975), and Africa dolce e selvaggia (1982) might suggest. This time around they enlisted Guerrasio and Pellini, figuring they'd be able to stage a whole lot more shocking and sickening footage as four men than they'd be able to as two, I'd assume. The results are both shocking and sickening, as expected. Not for the easily queasily...


Remember where you were when Lil' Wayne first got his grill hooked up?
After we see a dead, old, tribal gent chucked into a burial hole in the ground, and some brutish-looking "primitive women"(don't blame me, blame the narrator) doing their chores, we're treated to many shots of Nat Geo-level flabby pancake tits. Be forewarned, there might even be more flabby pancake tit here than in Babs Streisand's sex tape. But I'm proud to say, I'll never know for sure. Then we've got malnourished kids eating snot-looking goop out of a cauldron and frying some rodents over an open fire, and a child's burial ceremony that ends with a corpse's severed head in a tree. If you wince at the thought of a dentist's chair, there's some African body mods next that'll have you welcoming his humming drill with an open yapped smile. Then some scarification and the familiar plate-stretched lips, after which, it could only be circumcision time. Some women gather by a puddle to menstruate, then we see the original 'twerkers' shakin' they assets, baby. While some are shown to have converted to Catholicism, we're next treated to the tribe's dead dog dance. It's a gruesome, lively little number, that's followed up by the obligatory dog meat feast. Hey, save a nose for me, ya greedy bastiges...


Some African tribal body mods are a lot creepier than others, just sayin'.
After you've emptied your first chuck bucket, the brothers C show you a thorough shave, some more gruesome-looking body mods, some pre-Sally Struthers fly-eyed children, severed monkey heads, and bat meat on a stick. In the marketplace, a woman purchases a wooden phallus, and then the females have a go at circumcision, themselves. There's lively dancing, enhanced by double shots of goat blood straight off the tap, followed by some peeps chowing down on a live swarm of flying insects as they're being pestered by them. Bloody hospital hijinks precede a formal sequence at a night club that segues into some prostitutes preening for work in the Sudan, and by 'work', I naturally mean a groovy hashish party with 45 rpm pop records in Arabic and spear fishing. An antelope gets slaughtered and a hunter rubs animal poo all over himself as the tribeswomen make vases. After an elderly tribesman expires against a rock, the festivities come to a close with a pair of sloppy child births, as graphic as you like 'em. Cue: Italian lounge music. Roll credits.


Don't forget to wash him off in that rusty coffee can o' rainwater afterwards, for sterility's sake.
This is gross, tasteless, and more often than not, pretty disgusting to behold. Though the single wop score proves me unappreciative of all the cringe-worthy visuals on board here, I guess there might be a few out there who'd approve and groove on such an exploitative and ugly bag as this, but they are in a less karmic, less peaceful place than your humble narrator, and to them, I say: Do your own damned cult movie review website if you don't like it.


Scrapple lovers'll appreciate this screenshot.

"Des Morts"(1979)d/Jean-Paul Ferbus, Dominique Garny, Thierry Zeno

My earliest memory of tonight's movie dates back to the early eighties, where a trip to Gallery of Sound left me holding the fifty dollar Media VHS of Basket Case(1982) in my left hand and the pricey eighty dollar plastic Gorgon clamshell VHS of this in my right.Not yet the eager young real death/real gore-hund I'd blossom into a few years later, I passed on the impressively packaged/ridiculously priced Belgian deathumentary in favour of Henenlotter's legendary siamese brothers, and wouldn't come across it again until one of my regular mom and pop video store 'going out of business' sales haunts in the middle of nowhere years later, for a couple of bucks in a bin by the register.After a successful evening of carousing cooze and getting wasted like a Viking does, I blew through early morning red lights to get home for a chance to finally screen the critically acclaimed thing without passing the fuck out like a chump, the way I ended up doing afterall.Paced somewhere between a funeral procession and the time that'd have to elapse for your entire cadaver to rot down to fertilizer, the filmmakers, who comprise the avant-garde team that brought us the aptly-named Vase de Noces(1974), translated as 'The Wedding Trough', but globally notorious as 'The Pig-Fucking Movie'(uhh, yeah...we'll be skipping that one here, folks.), mix ethnographic art and exploitation in serving up  the poetry, spirituality, and absurdity of death, in graphic detail, for the camera.

Still a two liter of Mt Dew Voltage, a bag of sensi, and some Sabbath away from qualifying as a "ripper".
You groove on dead bodies, man?You're about to get more than a couple here, believe you me.Corpses in various states of decomposition all pass the lens, matter-of-factly, as they're graphically dissected like so many fetal pigs in a high school laboratory(porn for morticians, really), incinerated into charcoal(more or less), and entered into the ground for that lengthy, unpleasant dirt nap that nobody likes to think about while they're surrounding themselves with material wealth and acquisitions or partying their balls off constantly like some guys think they're entitled to do.Ahem.You should be able to execute an autopsy or effectively prep a cadaver for a funeral by the time you've sat through all the procedures depicted in lurid detail for the cameras here.Burial rites your bag?Nepalese, Thai, Belgian, South Korean, and even Yank rituals are examined at exhaustive mandible-numbing length here and segued by exploitative shock cuts.All these funerals and still no stiffie joke?With much respect to Terry Jones of the Pythons, I'll take the high road here and pay my respects to the bereaved within with a moment of silent dedication that won't translate worth a good goddamn to anybody following at home.We see a guy who makes a living dumping people's ash remains over the Golden Gate Bridge via airplane, with discount group rates.Oh, but that's not all...

Even Johnny Blaze needs a little breather sometimes.
...and just when you thought you might get through a mondo shockumentary without having to witness any senseless animal death, four oxen selflessly give their lives for the filmmakers' lens in obligatory gruesome fashion, in case you were feeling too positively about the whole dark affair thus far.Hey, at least they slumped dead on their left sides, allowing the dead Thai mom that they were sacrificed in the name of, a peaceful passage into a joyous afterlife without wreaking vengeance or sickness upon her living relatives.I'm still thinking the cows just might have gotten assfucked on this particular deal.More, you demand? There's Mexican bull-skewering and butcher shop hijinks with still-twitching severed calf heads. Interviews with handicapped individuals soon follow, resulting in some serious heavying of some already weighty eyelids on this end.A satirical look at cryogenics is taken via color still photography For those of you wondering where the hell all the executions in this damned documentary are, ponder no further, as you bear witness to a would-be Filipino guerilla-turned-informant's check getting cashed by his former comrades, his twitching corpse dumped into a shallow grave(a scene Zeno cut from later prints of the film as 'unneccessary').The camera pans a cemetery as the film comes to a close, perhaps leaving more questions for the viewer than it has ultimately answered...

"Dude, the buzzer went off, gimme those fuckin' tweezers, ya cheater!"
Though I probably woulda dug Morts had I picked it up way back when, I have to think I ultimately made the right choice in wicker basket freaks and grillsful o' scalpels.By the time I finally saw the damned thing, I was a different animal entirely, senses dulled against most real shockumentary violence and death by the mid-80s surge of Faces, Traces, Scenes deathumentary barrage me and the boys willingly endured back then, though there are still a few clips I have trouble wrapping my eyes around to this day.Morts is tame in comparison to most of those aforementioned vids, and I'd imagine any hardened gorenophile or death metaller worth his(or her) tits in grue would have the same end result that I did that first time around: riding the somnambulistic sky dragon to la-la land and chainsawing wood planks on the couch where I sit like I was named Jean-fucking-Pierre or something.On the other hand, Morts is a cerebral otherworldly journey that just might hit the spot for one of those rainy afternoons when you're piped outta yer gourd and fancy contemplating the end, which coincidentally, awaits us all, with its cold, final embrace.Worth a look, two Biggies.

Don't you wish they could stay like this forever?Oh, wait...

"Being Different"(1981)d/Harry Rasky

Tonight we wrap our glassies around a documentary about sideshow freaks, errr, human oddities, ummm, y'know, I'm not exactly sure what the 'politically correct' term is these days for a dude, who, when asked where his brother is, replies "He's growing out of the side of my face, you can't miss him.", but judgmentless distinction doesn't come easy when looking at these folks focused upon in the Rasky-written and directed production, most of whom are Gibsonton, Florida denizens when not travelling the countryside with carnival sideshows.Ironically, listening to the pretentious narration as delivered by Christopher Plummer, who'd come a long way from his Sound of Music(1965) salad days in trying to make a nearly eight foot tall giantess seem ordinary without directly pointing up at her, screaming, and running for his life like an evacuated Tokyoan as Rodan's leathery wings menacingly flap over the metropolis.Yeah guys, next time you're trying to document the triumph of people over life-altering deformities and handicaps in a condescending p.c. light, you might wanna leave out sex life questions in your interview with three foot tall midgets, it just makes you sound like a glorified barker selling tickets outside the big tent.Kind of like the one you hired to introduce each human oddity here?I'll go out on a limb here and surmise that these folks are probably pretty used to "Holy FUCK!" expressions and comments from people in this stage of their lives, especially if they're making a living in a sideshow or in a Guinness Museum display.But that's the good thing about this one, kids, you can leave the pretense to the filmmakers and be properly astounded, guilt-free.

I wish you and Cactus Jack all the luck in the world, brother.
First stop on the "C'mere! You GOTTA see this!" Express is Gibsonton, Florida, the winter home away from home for carnival folk, where we're introduced to the Galyons, adult twins who are conjoined at the large intestine, have no outward genitals(!), and are situated face to face.Watching them tread the basepath during a softball game reminds me of two guys in a horse costume.Ronnie profoundly says of brother, Donnie: "That's because we are like brothers.Wherever I go, he goes, and wherever I go, he goes."Nah, dude, you are brothers, but besides whiffing on the Bette Midler lyrics, you're like some creepy Harryhausen animation once you start moving all those legs.Then there's a dwarven fire eater who looks like my dad circa the nineties, the grumpy 729 lb Paul Fishe who lays to waste the 'jolly fatso' myth, a hefty female bookend, Icelandic giant and former B-movie actor, Johann Petursson, who, at eight foot two, needs dual walking canes just to get around, and his opposite, Dolly Reagan, who's an ordinary head on an underdeveloped infant-sized body.After asking her considerate questions like "Do you feel like a freak?", they get down to the nitty-gritty and beat around the bush about her sex life.From 'human dolls' we switch to the 'strangest married couple', or simply Alligator-skinned Boys and the Monkey Girls who love them.He just looks like he could use some lotion(about a fifty-five gallon drum's worth), while she can't go shopping in public(even in Gibsonton) without rocking an Arab-style veil over her non-ironic beard, while their average son appears on-camera to subtly answer the interviewer's sex question before he can even ask it.

"Fore!" might be a bit too much for you.Try "One and a half!" instead.
After some irksome filler footage involving amusement park rides and hot air balloons over a forgettable music soundtrack, we're whisked outta the carny world and into the "normal" one, where being different is once again measured in opposites:First Sandy Allen, at 7'7", the world's tallest woman, then cult movie personality Billy Barty and clips of the annual Little People convention, where we see dwarves rollerskate.Then, we're off to Montreal where we meet a six foot man who's married to a three foot woman and living in a midget-sized house.We see him flush the cute little toilet.Then he's finally asked about his sex life, to which he wisecracks that it's better than his previous marriage to a normal-sized woman.Bob Melvin's box art-gracing, elephantiasis-ravaged grill is next, and we watch him ride a bike, and be memorialized at his local Missouri church for some reason...while he's still breathing.A lengthy disco segment doesn't quite prepare us for the crab-pincered marathon runner/motivational speaker who was also born without feet, the karateka with one leg who blows through pine boards with his arm stub, two legless rascals, and finally, a Texas lass born without arms who shimmies into her jeans with a wire hanger, drives a car, writes, knits, and even gives her son haircuts with her feet.We hear a sacchariferous ballad to Louise herself, who's been married twice already(once at twelve years old, insert your own "Yeeeeeee-haaaaaaaaawww!" here) as she skateboards, daydreaming about posing for Playboy.Plummer returns to coerce good feelings out of a shell-shocked audience while prattling on about the human spirit and other insincere verbal knick-knackery...

We'll return to "When 75% of Your Face Wages War with The Other 25%" right after these words from our sponsor...
The late Rasky, a leading Canadian documentary director, covered subject matter like Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller, and Chagall when he wasn't penning the awful lyrics to the personalized songs in tonight's review(which were composed by Paul Zaza, who provided scores to genre films like Prom Night(1980), My Bloody Valentine(1981), and Porky's(1983) by the way) or ignoring substance and structure in revealing these extraordinary individuals in the same damned exploitative geekshow light we've peeked at human oddities in all along, only from behind an artificial moral shield.Billy Barty(nee Bertanzetti!) was a native Pennsylvanian who acted in 177 films from 1927 until the time of his death in 2000.The Galyon brothers now boast of being the world's oldest conjoined twins, long retired from the sideshow circuit to a tranquil life somewhere in Ohio.On the scale, Different rates two solid Wops, and makes for one of the more memorable mondo documentaries of the eighties.

Yeah, but can she handle a standard tranny?

R.I.P.: Gualtiero Jacopetti

4 September 1919 – 17 August 2011

"Brutes and Savages"(1978)d/Arthur Davis

In the midst of a heatwave, with temperatures still at a sweltering 101F at eight pm tonight, your humble N is sweating like Oprah Winfrey wearing a full-length sable on an elliptical trainer during the scirocco in El Azizia.To break the streak of three straight four wop movies, we focus our collective lenses upon what looks to be another Italian mondo documentary upon first glance, but is little more than a cheap British clone of little renown and even less scruples, that's guaranteed to disappoint regardless of what you came into it expecting to see.First(and only, thankfully)time director Arthur Davis promises "1001 forbidden scenes", but delivers "Let's see how many different animals we can throw to the alligators in ninety-one minutes" instead.For serious.Davis plods methodically from one boring South American Indio sequence to another and before the entire production dies a slow and unnatural death, he peppers in staged animal cruelty, and, in at least one seam-ripper of a resounding failure, a phony animal attack that's sure to have you rewinding and laughing out loud at least twice before you frisbee the cursed thing across the room and ragefully call for the heads of all persons responsible for this dismal Synapse release with the misleadingly choice cover art that you paid good money for.It consternates me that soundtrack maestro Riz Ortolani and Richard (Dr. Menard from Fulci's Zombi 2(1980))Johnson lent their presences to this ignoble lampoon.I opted to pass on the Synapse "Special Edition", as my custom DVD burn from the long out-of-print MPI VHS print is all I'll ever need to see.I suppose a synopsis is due.Onwards!

Truth in advertising, my cock.
After the film's producers have the cazzies to flash the words "A Factual Report" across the screen, and a snazzy disco beat(that I'm sure I've heard ripped off in one or more Bruce Li z-grade chopsocky epics) is dropped by Riz Ortolani, we see a montage of unrelated images:Indios-in-Spin-Doctors-hats in canoes, a leopard forced into pawing a wild boar, a snarling cougar, a lanky black dude with a spear in enough theatrical grease paint to choke Marcel Marceau, a cougar pouncing on a bunny, some Yanomamos in a canoe blowdarting a monkey then chucking it onto an open flame before the voice of Richard Johnson leads us to South America, where Davis' "expedition" is about to take place.First we see Arthur Davis and his meatslicer haircut and porn 'stache cozying up to Inca authority Dr. Sanginas, who's gonna chart out the Andes for the foreigner's cameras, and apparently also gonna let Davis choice of a gaudy and wide lavender tie slide just this once.More Inca descendants fishing around swampy reeds in canoes.Next, all lovers of the llama should probably skip ahead in the review, as a head's up.You aren't gonna groove on the next sequence.As a religious event on the Inca calendar, everybody dons their best colorful gypo duds and blow flutes, marching in circles on the beach.A heavyweight Indio gal is primped and preened by the men in the cowboy hats, and it is noted that not long ago, she'd have been the sacrifice.An ornately decorated and unsuspecting llama is brought to shore in a reed boat, after which all its limbs are held down in the sand while it's throat is cut and heart is pulled out, still beating, from it's chest.Then we're treated to more shantytown footage than they'd use in a Desmond Dekker and the Aces video.Then a brown-skinned peon with some lax dental habits lays carnal waste to a native virgin in a Sabrina the Teen Witch headband while swaying in a hammock.Some might say he laid the pipe, Tracie Savage of Friday the 13th Pt.3 in 3D fame would probably vote for the hammock.

"If youuuu...wanna bring me llama hearts...then go ahead nowwww", sing the Spin Doctors in their latest failed comeback attempt.
A juvenile opposum survives a constrictor's venomless strikes only to get its eyes pecked out by an eagle's beak.The bird then grasps the lifeless rodent by its eyesockets and flaps off.Then a hawk makes a meal of a snake, then an alligator chomps one down like writhing live spaghettoni.A juvenile anaconda is coerced into getting snapped down the throat of another large alligator.WTF moment:"When an alligator mates with a crocodile, the offspring is usually a very vicious monster."(When the fuck would that be, since the species don't interbreed like, ever?)Next an armadillo is thrown to the alligators, and we're forced to watch it get crushed in the reptile's formidable jaws.Then some blacks in gresepaint eat raw fiddler crabs and cross a river until an unbelievable alligator hand puppet(why would you substitute something so hokey and fake for an animal you've wasted half the length of your documentary showing?) attacks one of the slower tribesman and through quick cuts and splashing around, is shown to have lost a hand and been maimed by the phony prop.A boring coca leaf farm is followed by equally snore-inducing sheepherding set to the groovy theme music.Out of nowhere comes some impromptu brain surgery footage.Also pretty yawnable.Then we see some pornographic Inca waterbowls with various sex acts depicted upon them.Just when we thought they'd exhausted their staged mondo alligator footage, a mortally wounded jaguar is then thrown to a gaggle of sizeable alligators.Back to the llamas, who are getting it on for the cameras.Finally, two Indios in Spin Doctor hats pretend to bugger a llama from behind.Johnson remarks that violence lurks in all of us, and so does the 'brute', and so does the 'savage'.Then, thankfully, it's all over.

"Mom sees that alligator hand puppet and food dye in the pool, and she's gonna cream ya, Beav', you kook."
Usually a legit shockumentary is packed with enough gritty reality to rend it difficult to watch at certain points, while a hoke-u-mentary is stuffed full of boring filler material, staged hokum, and grainy death camp footage you've seen a hundred times before, making it difficult to watch for all the wrong reasons, and Brutes is no exception to the latter, minus the WW2 sequences, thank the gods.This entry is a piss-poor example of the subgenre, and one that should be avoided at all costs, unless you're an sadistic alligator enthusiast who always wondered what it'd look like if you chucked helpless animals to their watery graves at the jaws of these brutal reptiles.I never really fit into that category, myself, so I give Brutes a very disappointing one wop on the rating scale.Skip it.

See! Backwards stonatas unashamedly give it to llama-caboose simulatedly!

"Manson"(1973)d/Robert Hendrickson,Laurence Merrick

We've got a rare and beautiful gem under the jeweler's loup tonight, a crazy diamond of legendary drug-soaked proportions, and my favorite of all the documentaries concerning the notorious 'Manson Family' and their pint-sized purveyor of prison prophecy, Charlie himself.As the story goes, some young filmmakers working on a documentary focusing on the communal lifestyle of hippies filmed the Manson gang at the Spahn Ranch, Devil's Canyon, and the Barker Ranch in Death Valley, completely unaware of who they were or what they were about, until during the editing process they were shocked to see Manson grinning and aping for news cameras on television, and rushed down to the Hall of Justice to get footage of the unfolding trial as it happened.The film later found itself banned after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme's attempted assassination of President Ford(with no rounds in the chamber when she pointed the gun, it's pretty safe to say she was just gunning for three hots and a cot at the time, IMHO) to preserve her right to a fair and speedy trial.I scored a Beverly Wilshire Filmworks boot of the movie years ago on Times Square in the early morning hours, which later went for significant amounts of Happy Talk cash on eBay until the director, Hendrickson, dropped a copyright bomb on them, getting listings pulled, and finally suing the company itself.Hendrickson later offered personalized, autographed dvd-r's of Manson for long bux at Exclusive Films' website, but hadn't responded to e-mail queries as recently as two years ago, so that's a shot in the dark(kinda like the whole "Helter Skelter" black/white race war conspiracy angle, but hey, that's just what I think).Co-director/producer Laurence Merrick, who had helmed Dracula and the Boys(1969), The Black Angels(1970), and Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?(1971) prior, was shot in the back and killed in Hollywood by a berserk student-stalker from his acting school in 1977.It only gets better from there...

Pittman, Fromme, and Good:Would, would, and uh...would.Yes.
As Sandra Good shares some philosophy about murder and moving children to the desert, we're introduced to the key players in tonight's entry.Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkle, Van Houten, Watson, Beausoleil.Death Row times six(changed to life imprisonment in 1972).Deputy District Attorney Vince Bugliosi then speaks about how "far out" the murders were to the public-at-large, and the perpetrators, even more so.The narrator(Jess Pearson) then fleshes out the crimes and the victims themselves, as Bugliosi serves up a gore score(169 stab wounds, 7 gunshot wounds).We're shown Tex and the Manson girls and their aliases in various stages of incarceration with the narrator relating human details of their pre-Charlie lives.On August 11th, Manson and several of his cohabitants are raided at the Spahn Ranch and charged with grand theft auto.Enter Nancy Pittman, Lynette Fromme, and Sandra Good, all playing with hunting knives and long rifles, peppering Beatles lyrics with profanity, and rapping about death.Ronnie Howard, who had been cellmates with Susan Atkins, relates Bobby Beausoleil's earlier torture/murder of Gary Hinman on Manson's orders for the cameras.We're then given the throwaway background of Manson himself, born to an unwed teenager who was later locked up for prostitution; foster homes, reformatories, jails, state prisons, federal prisons, and finally San Quentin, cell 13, Death Row.We're then showed how the racial unrest of the 1960's shaped Manson's Beatle-based master plan as he was released from prison in 1967(despite the White Album not being released for another year)and descended upon the hippie movement of Haight-Ashbury, "a venus fly trap among the flowers".Ex-Mansonite Paul Watkins tells how beautiful the hippies were, visibly still a little groggy from all the drugs he'd been doing.

"We used belladonna, hashish, smoked marijuana a lot, mescaline, opium, we didn't mess around with any hard drugs."- Paul Watkins
Watkins reinforces Bugliosi's far-fetched race war angle(it's near to impossible to start a crossword puzzle on L.S.D., just sayin'), before ex-cellmates remember Manson as a "Pay me no mind" kinda guy.Non-jailed Mansonettes praise him for saving them from their boring lives.Brooks Poston tells how Charlie was Christ to him while tripping on acid.We then see Family members skinny-dipping and helping George Spahn around the ranch.Squeaky proudly displays his ceremonial vest, four or five years of continuous stitching by the girls later, their hair woven into the seams from when they shaved their heads(My birthday's still 6 months away, ladies!).Family births are detailed, and the participation of Manson children in drugs and regular orgies.Nancy Jordan describes sex with Manson as cold and sadistic.Watkins relates the group's constant hallucinogenic drug intake."Love Never Dies" is heard as the Family does some creepy erotic interpretive dances for the camera.Pittman tells of all the violence she encountered watching tv as a kid.The way Charlie grooved on playing on one's deepest fears is discussed.Squeaky romanticizes about a hunting knife.Watkins and Poston perform a guitar/flute duet.Clem psychobabbles and freaks out in slow motion as his role in a ranch hand's beheading is detailed.Finally, Manson speaks for himself.He starts out on a victim trip and eventually giggles his way to Sneakyville.Young people of the day are interviewed.Some actually dig him.The Manson girls suggest the Tate/LaBianca murders were copycat killings to spring Beausoleil from jail(much, more likely,don't you think?).Watkins remarks how un-groovy Charlie's death trip was.The camera pulls back from two Manson girls sitting on the corner across from the Hall of Justice as the end credits roll.

You can't spell 'psychotic' without h-o-t.
Interestingly enough, Steve "Clem" Grogan, who the filmmakers seemingly went out of their way to portray as the most animalistic psycho of the bunch after having been deemed borderline retarded in court, having denounced Manson in 1977 and provided authorities with the burial plot of "Shorty" Shea, was released on parole in 1985(the only Mansonite convicted of murder to ever do so!), rumoured to have taken up house painting around the Frisco area(!!"Yeah, Clem, 'blood red' might offend my neighbors...").Sherry Cooper who fled the family is believed to have been i.d.'ed as a Jane Doe body that turned up stabbed to death down an embankment in November of '69.Ronnie Howard was kidnapped from a bus terminal in 1979, beaten, robbed, and died of her injuries twelve days later.Spacy hippie Paul Watkins ended up founding the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce(!), and serving as an unofficial mayor(!!) of Tecopa, a small town in Death Valley, before succumbing to leukemia in 1990, while his "Desert Sun" partner-in-music, Brooks Poston, allegedly enjoys a simple life, still playing music.Following up the Family children(Pooh Bear, Zezozose, Phoenix, Ivan, Angel et al) is another story in and of itself, with legs like Juliette Prowse.As it stands, Manson is a fascinating documentary with lots of freaky moments that you should add to your collection if the chance arises.On the scale, it creepy-crawls to the top with a perfect score of Four big ones.To know you know it, is to know it.

"If you're going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy."-Charlie

"Africa Addio"(1966)d/Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi

Tonight we'll focus on two Italian filmmakers who are no strangers to controversy.Having shocked the entire world in creating what would come to be known as the "mondo" film in 1962 with Mondo Cane, they would outdo themselves a thousand-fold with the release of tonight's entry just four years later, a searing portrait of a changing continent that the film's detractors(which include Roger Ebert) have accused of being bathed in pro-white European colonial racism(Europeans filmed in soft focus as their properties are seized, black Africans shot with a fish-eye lens from unflattering angles) and chock full of staged sequences, to which Jacopetti responded with an adamant denial, claiming that the only footage the two men ever staged appeared in the earlier Mondo Cane 2, and that everything one sees within Addio is completely real.Jacopetti even found himself being tried for murder in Italian court over the film, amidst accusations that one of the on-screen executions in the movie was staged for the cameras.He was eventually acquitted.West German protesters at screenings of the film in Berlin are looked upon as the first anti-racist movement that Germany had ever experienced, and the film was banned outright as racist in Italy.The U.S. cut, Africa:Blood and Guts, released four years later in 1970, is even more sensaltionalist.
Inevitably, I'm forced to interject my own personal feelings on the controversial film here.Addio is an important work, both shocking and thought-provoking, in that it reveals not a biased slant towards white or black(it really doesn't), but the depraved depths we as a species can sink to, if left to our own devices.The unflinching lens of two documentary filmmakers shows us our own preordained nature which harbors both redeeming good and deplorable evil.It's who we all are, it's what we all do to differing extents.Whether or not you can handle a film like this that evokes great emotion in every single frame depends entirely on how big the horse blinders you've chosen to experience life through are.If this all seems a bit too unsettling for you, I suggest you screen the film anyway, as it may just be the wake up call you need.

A cruel bonfire burns out of control.
At the outset, we see the dark continent as it says farewell to its old colonial ways, and welcomes a new era with Great Britain providing much pomp and circumstance as the guard changes.Then there's a fox hunt, only the fox in this case is dead, lending its scent to the hounds, and handled by a running African native.Then we see the trial of some Africans who've snuck onto a British-owned farm and murdered everyone in their sleep, slashing the tendons in the legs of the livestock as some added cruelty.We then turn to the auctioning of white European property and belongings to Africans who remain.A lush estate once owned by whites gets impromptu landscaping via explosions and bulldozers and is now occupied by a hundred Africans who bust up the furniture for a bonfire and use the bathtub as a makeshift playpen for multiple infants.Then we watch hundreds of black Africans trying to tame a group of wild horses, that, according to narration, is "physically racist" and fearful of being handled by the blacks.Finally, we bear witness to the mass southerly migration of displaced Boer farmers, before dropping in on a big game hunt, edited for time by a helicopter driving a bull elephant directly to a hunter so that he can shoot it dead from point blank range, as compared to a massive throng of natives group-spearing a wide variety of animal species, not excluding a bull elephant and a hippopotamus that they repeatedly spear like a colossal pin cushion.Then we witness European volunteers rescuing and rehabilitating a wounded,sick elephant, with one poor bastard losing his arm past the elbow in the massive beast's turd cutter.All together now,bleeech.Next we focus on the poacher element that has been exploiting the chaotic political climate to rape the African plains of countless animal skins and tons worth of ivory tusks, before watching a baby zebra rescued from its mother's lifeless,poached corpse by airlift as the sun sets.

The only spears not sticking out of this poor hippo is probably Britney.
The Italians document a massacre of Arabs by African insurgents in Zanzibar by plane, complete with burned out villages, mass graves, and beaches scattered with Muslim cadavers.The camera then follows the quelling of an Angolan rebel uprising by mercenaries, complete with firefight and obligatory smoked out,flaming corpses; before we turn to the Bantu massacre of Watusi in Rwanda as evidenced by piles of amputated hands and post-murder Bantu perps mugging for the camera.Before we're too sickened by human v. human violence, the lens again focuses on animal violence, as several antelope, elephants, and hippos are sent to their maker by point blank, high caliber death, then hacked into sections for the cameras(a pregnant hippo corpse is robbed of its unborn fetus and a jeep drags a grue-stained severed elephant head across the terrain in low points of the segment,where the Italians remark that the most ferocious animal in Africa has to be man himself.).A vast wasteland of dried animal bones is tragically panned across.We then set our sights on the miracle of South Africa, as bikini-clad Euro girls run, swing, and do trampoline flips in slow motion juxtaposed against the backdrop of Cape Town(my favorite segment,I ain't gonna lie to ya), then some Africans in traditional Zulu garb break out some instruments and play some rock n' roll, before we see modernized tribeswomen adopting the clothing and mannerisms of European women, and the League of Decency handing out bvds to Zulus(!).I say, put that Alabama blacksnake away, M'butu.Pantsify yourself, old chap.Then we follow a libidinous male lion unable to get his swerve on due to carloads of voyeuristic tourists.The aftermath of a muslim massacre in Tanganyika is captured on film, and then unrest in Uhuru Square where the filmmakers are nearly executed before someone notices that "they aren't white, they're Italians".A massacre in Stanleyville by Simba rebels is also documented, and the subsequent counterattack by mercenaries, black and white bodies alike feeding the scavengers.Finally, we examine the gold and diamond industry before focusing on a small group of penguins on the crashing surf at sunset.Wow.

White South African girls enjoying their favorite pastime: slo-mo trampoline flips.
Let the squeamish be forewarned, there's enough wholesale animal murder and mutilation(set to a mostly upbeat score by maestro Riz Ortolani)captured here for a hundred Umberto Lenzi movies, and nearly as much human slaughter to match it.The U.S. print(Blood and Guts)removes most of the non-exploitative material, leaving just 90 expurgated minutes worth of human cruelty, as opposed to the nearly two and a half hour running time of the director's cut, as included in Blue Underground's excellent Mondo Cane Collection, released a few years back; a necessary addition to any worthwhile genre collection, indeed.An amazing movie, by any standards, and completely successful in generating a response from its audience with its cruel and powerful imagery that few could dismiss easily.You may never see another movie like it, but you owe it to yourself to give it a shot, at least once.A closed minded leftist idiot like Roger Ebert may have given you zero stars back in 1967, but Addio, you're four wops from first frame to last, to me, baby.Highest recommendation.

"Don't back up over that unusual looking rumble strip, boys, you'll blow the tires..."

"Witchcraft '70"(1970)d/Luigi Scattini

Just got through this seldom-seen "shockumentary" in two viewings(I fell asleep half way through the first time)after years of fruitless searching for a watchable copy.For the record,let me state that if true witchcraft was ANYTHING like what this film's makers captured on cameras back in 1970(and allegedly paid greenbacks for "secret 8 mm documentaries" from unknown individuals for),then the occult arts and black magic simply ain't much to write home to Aunt Beatrice about,period.

Newlyweds exclaim "King Diamond rules!" from Anton LaVey's Black Church.
The viewer is treated to 88 very tedious,tame minutes of occult practices in Bali,New Orleans,and California,among other places,all seen through the eyes of the mayor of squaresville.To validate their prudish outlook on the subject,they even interviewed a deaf-ish police officer with a speech impediment to emphasize the threat to society these cults pose.If witchcraft were to take hold of large numbers of the populace,he reasons,the world could arguably be gripped in a second medieval age,he lisps.And who would rule over these global covens,Officer Douchebag?Alice Cooper?

I really groove on Satan's cloven hooves,maaaan.
So what are the filmmakers committing to the big screen as a cautionary warning to parents of the world?Well,it seems the recurring themes in witchcraft back at the outset of the seventies were:
1)Nudity-You CANNOT show affection for the dark lord and master while your bell bottoms are still on.
2)Groovy dancing-Just like a Josie and the Pussycats musical segment,but with no troublesome clothes to get in the way.
3)Wine laced with L.S.D.-Nothing brings outta sight otherworldly demons to the party like mind-altering hallucinogens.
4)Guy in papier mache' goat mask-He only feels like a jackass until the naked,acid-soaked hippie chicks start grooving off of him.
5)Sexual freedom-Herein lies the true draw to the dark arts.You throw a pentagram necklace on,utter some mumbo jumbo,sip some chicken blood out of a metal chalice,you KNOW you're gonna get laid very shortly.
There you have it.Whether you're a Louisiana Voodoo Queen,or Anton LaVey,the devil is a means to get some righteous coital action.And if you're a parent of an impressionable teenaged hippie girl,monitor those acid rock concerts she's been seen grooving at,otherwise,she's gonna end up stoned and spreadeagle underneath some satanic cats somewhere in Death Valley.Those of us who don't touch up our drape haircuts with a belt sander knew all this beforehand,of course,but in brief intervals,this documentary could prove guilty amusement on a Wednesday night.

Wake up,warlock,you're supposed to be performing some spooky witchery!