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BrunoMattei said:
@Syaoran Li We're still waiting on your fucking mondo movies, mang.
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Sorry for taking so long.

So, I'll admit I'm a newbie to Mondo but it's recently caught my eye given its influence on horror and exploitation as a whole. There's a lot I haven't seen but I'm getting more into it.

The genre began with 1962's Mondo Cane and hit its zenith with Faces of Death and its myriad sequels and rip-offs.

The more I look into it, I'd say there there are about four or so main categories of this genre and each one is practically a generation on its own. Here's my rough outline of that.

As I delve deeper into the genre and watch more of these, I'll update this post and I might even do mini-reviews of them.

Classic Mondo - This is the OG European shockumentaries of the 60's and 70's, most of them were from Italy but there were a few that were from West Germany and France. They tended to be more varied in their sensationalist topics.

Mondo Cane is the first big one and I'll admit I still need to watch that one.

There's also the infamous Shocking Asia and Africa: Blood and Guts. Stuff like Women of the World and Sweden: Heaven and Hell focused more on sexuality instead of violence or bizarre tribal customs.

My personal favorite is Goodbye Uncle Tom just for the sheer balls of the filmmakers to make that movie. Even by the standards of the genre at the time, it was harsh.

Fun fact, the song Mahna Mahna was from Sweden: Heaven and Hell and IIRC, it popped up in a few other mondo films before it found its way on the Muppets.

Death Films: The second major wave of mondo was spearheaded by my introduction to the genre, the original Faces of Death from 1978. This film was a gamechanger, even if most of the death scenes were dramatized.

From that point on, most of the mondo films during the 80's and 90's were focused on death, violence, and gore. A lot of the films also tended to be Japanese co-productions. Faces of Death had a fuckton of sequels and it inspired a bunch of rip-offs, most of which had their own series.

Traces of Death back in the 90's was probably the most successful of the rip-offs and all of the footage was clips of actual deaths and injuries. Most notably, the Budd Dwyer tape became legendary due to its inclusion in this series.

Other notable films included the schlocky Faces of Gore and my personal favorite in the genre, The Killing of America.

Reality Mondo: I'm not sure what else to call this but I'll give it the name "Reality Mondo" since it took off around the same time reality TV did back in the early 2000's. These are the kind of films you'd buy at ghetto gas stations or through infomercials.

Bum Fights, Criminals Gone Wild, Real Talk, and pretty much any of the videos that made their way to World Star Hip-Hop are focused on gangs, street fights, and trashy people in general behaving badly.

Girls Gone Wild was pretty much softcore porn with mondo vibes and deserves a mention since it began as a spin-off to Joe Francis's earlier mondo effort Banned On Television.

The Fox specials from the 90's and early 2000's like When Animals Attack, Train Wrecks, and shows like Real TV often feel like a TV-PG toned-down version of the mondo genre.

Internet Mixtapes: I don't really care for this genre but since it's got a lot of attention thanks to Wendigoon's iceberg video, it deserves a mention. These are just mixtapes of gruesome footage taken from shock sites, extreme cinema, and extreme porn. At best, they can be described as taking the concept of mondo and boiling it down to its most crude and simple form. I get the appeal, but it doesn't interest me that much.

The only one I've seen all the way through was Ensuring Your Place In Hell since it at least had a bit of a structure and overall was good despite being gruesome at times. I actually liked that one.

Proto-Mondo: These are older films that tend to fall into one of two categories. The first are films that only did the bare minimum to be considered "educational" so they could get around the Hays Code at the time.

The second kind of proto-mondo are educational films that are genuine in their intent but are still so shocking and sensationalist in their content. A lot of these were shown in high schools.

Probably the most well-known would be Red Asphalt and the sub-genre of "driver's safety" films. The 1950's and 1960's in general were rife with educational films that were meant to scare kids and teens.
 
Syaoran Li said:
Sorry for taking so long.

So, I'll admit I'm a newbie to Mondo but it's recently caught my eye given its influence on horror and exploitation as a whole. There's a lot I haven't seen but I'm getting more into it.

The genre began with 1962's Mondo Cane and hit its zenith with Faces of Death and its myriad sequels and rip-offs.

The more I look into it, I'd say there there are about four or so main categories of this genre and each one is practically a generation on its own. Here's my rough outline of that.

As I delve deeper into the genre and watch more of these, I'll update this post and I might even do mini-reviews of them.

Classic Mondo - This is the OG European shockumentaries of the 60's and 70's, most of them were from Italy but there were a few that were from West Germany and France. They tended to be more varied in their sensationalist topics.

Mondo Cane is the first big one and I'll admit I still need to watch that one.

There's also the infamous Shocking Asia and Africa: Blood and Guts. Stuff like Women of the World and Sweden: Heaven and Hell focused more on sexuality instead of violence or bizarre tribal customs.

My personal favorite is Goodbye Uncle Tom just for the sheer balls of the filmmakers to make that movie. Even by the standards of the genre at the time, it was harsh.

Fun fact, the song Mahna Mahna was from Sweden: Heaven and Hell and IIRC, it popped up in a few other mondo films before it found its way on the Muppets.

Death Films: The second major wave of mondo was spearheaded by my introduction to the genre, the original Faces of Death from 1978. This film was a gamechanger, even if most of the death scenes were dramatized.

From that point on, most of the mondo films during the 80's and 90's were focused on death, violence, and gore. A lot of the films also tended to be Japanese co-productions. Faces of Death had a fuckton of sequels and it inspired a bunch of rip-offs, most of which had their own series.

Traces of Death back in the 90's was probably the most successful of the rip-offs and all of the footage was clips of actual deaths and injuries. Most notably, the Budd Dwyer tape became legendary due to its inclusion in this series.

Other notable films included the schlocky Faces of Gore and my personal favorite in the genre, The Killing of America.

Reality Mondo: I'm not sure what else to call this but I'll give it the name "Reality Mondo" since it took off around the same time reality TV did back in the early 2000's. These are the kind of films you'd buy at ghetto gas stations or through infomercials.

Bum Fights, Criminals Gone Wild, Real Talk, and pretty much any of the videos that made their way to World Star Hip-Hop are focused on gangs, street fights, and trashy people in general behaving badly.

Girls Gone Wild was pretty much softcore porn with mondo vibes and deserves a mention since it began as a spin-off to Joe Francis's earlier mondo effort Banned On Television.

The Fox specials from the 90's and early 2000's like When Animals Attack, Train Wrecks, and shows like Real TV often feel like a TV-PG toned-down version of the mondo genre.

Internet Mixtapes: I don't really care for this genre but since it's got a lot of attention thanks to Wendigoon's iceberg video, it deserves a mention. These are just mixtapes of gruesome footage taken from shock sites, extreme cinema, and extreme porn. At best, they can be described as taking the concept of mondo and boiling it down to its most crude and simple form. I get the appeal, but it doesn't interest me that much.

The only one I've seen all the way through was Ensuring Your Place In Hell since it at least had a bit of a structure and overall was good despite being gruesome at times. I actually liked that one.

Proto-Mondo: These are older films that tend to fall into one of two categories. The first are films that only did the bare minimum to be considered "educational" so they could get around the Hays Code at the time.

The second kind of proto-mondo are educational films that are genuine in their intent but are still so shocking and sensationalist in their content. A lot of these were shown in high schools.

Probably the most well-known would be Red Asphalt and the sub-genre of "driver's safety" films. The 1950's and 1960's in general were rife with educational films that were meant to scare kids and teens.
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There's an excellent book on the subject:

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This edition came out in 95 so it's a little dated but there's an updated version that came out around 2012 or so.
 
I was watching Cinema Snob's episode on Leprechaun in the Hood when he name-dropped several recent entries in the Amityville "franchise" that I had to go on IMDB to see if they were legitimate. It turns out, they are.
1647909112726.png 1647909133045.png 1647909965911.png

Who knew real murders and a likely fabricated account of paranormal activity would lead to numerous low-budget independent films that cash in on the Amityville name.
 
The Nothingness said:
I was watching Cinema Snob's episode on Leprechaun in the Hood when he name-dropped several recent entries in the Amityville "franchise" that I had to go on IMDB to see if they were legitimate. It turns out, they are.
View attachment 3095334 View attachment 3095335 View attachment 3095377

Who knew real murders and a likely fabricated account of paranormal activity would lead to numerous low-budget independent films that cash in on the Amityville name.
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In the last decade or so it was discovered the "Amityville" name was up for grabs so everyone and their mother has been throwing that name on anything just to cash in.
 
Still here enjoying 'From' I think the stakes are being raised at a good pace and they are not blowing everything too early.

Thoughts on most recent episode.

It was pretty obvious that the guy who gave the monster flowers was going to let her in sooner rather than later, though I was pretty interested to see exactly how the 'mechanics' were going to work, can they open closed doors/windows freely once they are inside, etc.

The priest getting merc'd really took me by surprise, I was expecting him to last quite a bit longer.

Thank fuck Trudy is dead, hated that bitch.
 
Thinking on the movie NOPE coming out soon, have there been any decent scifi-horror alien invasion/abduction films in the last few years? I don't really count films like A Quiet Place because there isnt the UFO invasion aspect of it, I consider that more in the creature feature realm. Also open to shows too.
 
Yaks said:
Thinking on the movie NOPE coming out soon, have there been any decent scifi-horror alien invasion/abduction films in the last few years? I don't really count films like A Quiet Place because there isnt the UFO invasion aspect of it, I consider that more in the creature feature realm. Also open to shows too.
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I can't think of any recent (within the last decade) alien abduction movies.
 
Ah. There is a recent alien abduction film, and it's surprisingly decent, yet that's a spoiler for the bait and switch set up. It's called Horse Girl, and it pretends to be a Quirky (ie annoyingly twee) Girl Looking For Romance film before pulling the rug out. There's no invasion fleet or laser fights anything like that, though.

The other okay-ish one is The Vast of Night which pays more attention to recreating a 50s small town America vibe on no budget than spaceships and whatnot.

Are you sure I can't interest you in two Lovecraftian films done right instead? There's the zero-budget The Borderlands which has an ending that more than makes up for the annoying and frankly uneccessary found footage framing, a stark reveal that ripples backwards through the film recontextualising and amplifying the implied horror in previous scenes after the movie has ended. It loses points for gay jump scares and a muddle about the local yokels simultaneously being in on it and completely unaware of it all, but that magic trick ending excuses pretty much anything. If I was rich I'd frog march the cast and crew back to remake it as a proper film, but preserve that ending as is. It is also the only horror film I know to reference the short-lived phenomenum of "tape cursing" which was a thing in the 00s where larping satanists would record obscenities onto by-then obsolete audio tape, and then hang the tape onto bushes near churches and whatnot. It got completely out of hand in certain areas here in the UK, with ribbons and ribbons of tape lining the sides of roads near consecrated ground, even on relatively short car journeys you'd see it.

The other one is Becoming which isn't as satisfyingly psychological Lovecraft, but it works as a creepy horror film mostly due to the dramatic irony of the audience being introduced to the powers of mimickry deployed by the monsters in the first scene, and then the protagonsists blundering innocently into the situation. We know what deep shit they're in, and it plays on that rather satisfyingly, as well as other anxieties like home invasion and the like.

And for God's Sake don't ever watch The Toll, it's fucking offensive and utterly pretentious and vacuous on top.

The premise starts out well enough: two socially stunted millenials are forced into a spooky situation when a late night Uber ride satnav directs them into a creepy wood. The guy driver is a shy spazz, the girl a cold, tired traveller with jetlag, and for the first section you get the feeling it's going to be a character piece where they both open up and learn to not judge on appearances. In this opening sequence the performances are good, naturalistic, and communicate who both of them are, and why they are the way they are, and you like them for all their human shortcomings.

And then the film takes a massive shit on screen, and spends the remainer of the time rolling about in it, sweeping all of that good set up aside, and going full retard, and not in an entertaining way. The girl is cold because she doesn't trust men after being date raped at college, the guy driver is this nice enough nerd who frequently moves to protect her from the nonsensical monster bullshit despite being cowardly and soft, until the film decides, no, actually he's a serial killer and rapist after all, despite all we've seen and know about him, fuck you audience, and fuck you All Men Everywhere. The monster is shit and doesn't make sense, the scenes with odd imagery are devoid of context or meaning they are just there to look spooky, the old lady on the tractor who drives in to tell them the backstory of their situation verbatim is exactly that, and all in all it's offensive, poorly scripted, seemingly improvised after a point, and the two leads deserved to be in a much better film, or indeed, any other film. The Toll is so shit it makes The Bye Bye Man look like good John Carpenter. You do have to ask why they even bother starting to make a film like this if all they are going to do is insult their audience. It's a chore to watch presumably because the creators found it a chore to make, on top of everything else. What a waste of time all round. Don't even torrent it.
 
Yaks said:
Thinking on the movie NOPE coming out soon, have there been any decent scifi-horror alien invasion/abduction films in the last few years? I don't really count films like A Quiet Place because there isnt the UFO invasion aspect of it, I consider that more in the creature feature realm. Also open to shows too.
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I found this canadian movie a while ago.
It's a very basic "teens-get-terrorized-by-greys" kind of movie.
 
Internet War Criminal said:
It will get rave fucking reviews and people won't stop talking about it, but it looks like a super fucking heavy handed feminist message about how men are evil who constantly try to keep women down. Which is why the reviews will rave but I think I'll pass.

Basically what this guy is saying: View attachment 3108612
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I don't hold out a lot of hope in the era of artsy horror films, but it could be fun if they just play it out as a cult conspiracy thing. By the title though, probably not.

Gutpuke said:
I found this canadian movie a while ago.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=spStF7-UUqcIt's a very basic "teens-get-terrorized-by-greys" kind of movie.
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Yeah this one was fun. A lot of the alien-centric films that were good seem to have mostly dropped off after 2014. I've found a few decently entertaining ones (and I love shitty old monster movies and alien invasion films, so my bar for quality is low) in the found footage genre, but not much else.
 
Turning to horror lit, I was checking out Austin William's Crimson Orgy, a seedy 2008 entry set in the milieu of 1960s exploitation horror filmmaking and frankly that alone was enough to interest me.

An opening informs the reader of the shady reputation of the titular film, a cult classic based largely on the cursed production and possible snuff film aspect. The film was never truly released but had a couple different cuts leaked out to the public. Poor quality bootlegs and that sort.

Florida, 1965. Filmmaker Sheldon Meyer and producer Gene Hoffman have had small success as producers of nudie exploitation pics through their company Stupendous Pictures. Hoffman has the idea that they can make a lot of money producing a gory shock movie for the drive-ins inspired by the success of H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast (4 day shoot, $24,500 budget, $4 million in box office). More than that, they're going to produce something far in excess of such films. Meyer however still really wants to make the serious art films he's been dreaming about doing ever since getting into the movie biz and this leads to tension between the partners.

The one-week shoot, filmed on location in the small town of Hillsborough Beach by a small crew, runs into trouble almost immediately when the local deputy who is the law in those parts forces Meyer to give him a speaking part and even considering they are making a schlock movie here, calling his performance wooden would be too lenient.

There's plenty of tension behind the scenes, Meyer, out of an odd sense of prudishness, is feeding inexperienced but alluring leading lady Barbara Cheston the script a scene at a time, keeping her in the dark about the nature of the movie. She believes she's starring in a romantic film. Lead actor Vance Cogburn is a pretty boy alcoholic who has already run afoul of the local deputy. Jerry Cooke, playing the villain is a creepy gentleman who is perhaps getting lost in the role. As shooting continues, mishaps and problems accrue, including the theft of a film reel and the off-set death of an extra. Also, some residents of Hillsborough do not know there is a movie being filmed in their town.

What interested me was the integration of the quick-and-dirty shooting schedule, the problems that crop up and the techniques of shooting exploitation films into the story which helped ground it, and it makes me wish there were more works in this sort of setting.
 
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So I had never seen any version of Alien 3, and for some reason I decided to watch the Assembly Cut/Special Edition today. I'm not sure I can say anything that hasn't been said. Awesome nihilistic tone, the film looks great, the cast is good, the script is pretty solid. The first half especially is fantastic... and the film overstays its welcome in the second half, though it's still pretty good. Not scary, but tense and original, and that's good enough.

And I wish the wooden convent planet script had been made instead, but... eh, the Assembly Cut is fine. Maybe I'll watch the theatrical version at some point.
 
frozenrunner said:
So I had never seen any version of Alien 3, and for some reason I decided to watch the Assembly Cut/Special Edition today. I'm not sure I can say anything that hasn't been said. Awesome nihilistic tone, the film looks great, the cast is good, the script is pretty solid. The first half especially is fantastic... and the film overstays its welcome in the second half, though it's still pretty good. Not scary, but tense and original, and that's good enough.

And I wish the wooden convent planet script had been made instead, but... eh, the Assembly Cut is fine. Maybe I'll watch the theatrical version at some point.
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Honestly, it's really hard to make Alien 3 into a good movie, even with that cut. Sigourney didn't even want to do it but they gave her a dump truck full of money.
 
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