mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
get their comeuppance, lunched upon by their subjects while their transfixed partners continue to film through the feast.) Te old Mondo trick of contrasting the savage and civilized in order to raise the question of which is which is here used to question the methodology of Mondo filmmaking; Monroe’s on-the-nose closing comment after having watched the entirety of Te Green Inferno unspool might be the summation of the entire Mondo movement: “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”
Te second of the watershed films was completed
before Cannibal Holocaust, although it took a somewhat roundabout path into the public consciousness. Various sources place the U.S. premiere of Faces of Death, directed by John Alan Schwartz under the perfumed sobriquet “Conan Le Cilaire,” in the fall of 1978. It was only after the movie was a hit in Japan, however, that it was picked up by Aquarius Releasing, a distributor headquartered on Manhattan’s 42nd St. and operated by Australia-born Terry Levene, who was responsible for supplying the grindhouses of Times Square with the latest envelope- pushing product from Asia and Europe—particularly Italy. (Among his accomplishments was unforgettably retitling Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox [1981] as Make Tem Die Slowly.)
Faces begins with a prologue of autopsy close-ups
that recall, as all slithery viscera perforce must, Stan Brakhage’s Te Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). It then introduces its host, a suspicious-looking goateed coroner called Dr. Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr, a low-rent Donald Sutherland with crooked eyeglasses). Gröss explains that, spurred by a (helpfully visualized) dream, he has embarked on “a journey that would take me around the world in search of an understanding of death.” Much of what follows is fairly standard-issue
neither/nor
Mondo, generously larded with staged reenactments that rarely touch the verisimilitude of those by Jacopetti and Prosperi, right down to the “More”-esque theme music, here a treacly, uplifting tune called “Life’s a Stream.” Shortly before this number comes on, however, we’re treated to a collection of accident footage which, in budget and undeniable authenticity of the gore FX, is obviously beyond the abilities of the filmmakers: Train derailments, traffic accidents, and plane crashes including, as Dr. Gröss redundantly puts it, “the crash and the aftermath that followed” of PSA Flight 182, which leveled portions of the San Diego neighborhood of North Park in 1978.
Along with other found-footage bits including a suicide jump, these unstaged portions of Faces anticipate a new breed of Shockumentary, one that will rely in part or, increasingly in whole, on found footage culled from various outside sources, made possible by the new widespread proliferation of video equipment. Tis includes the Faces sequels—the second installment, though still hosted by the bogus Dr. Gröss, almost wholly dispenses with reenactments—the various Mondo Cane sequels trotted out by German producers, and the gristly nadir of the Mondo/Shockumentary cycle, the Traces of Death series. Tese grim processionals of slaughter, including such perennials as Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer discharging a .357 Magnum into his mouth on live television, professed to provide nothing of educational value beyond a masterclass in the various ways that the human body could be annihilated, though from the third installment onwards they acquire a host in the form of a faceless metalbro who goes by the name Brain Damage (producer Darrin Ramage), dealing in dreadfully droll punnery and speaking with a stilted, stentorian tone that sounds like a pre-adolescent lowering his voice two registers while trying to buy beer.
39
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
