HOW SAVAGE ARE YOU?

‘Brutes and Savages’ is a mondo film, so you’ll know what to expect: dusky foreign breasts and repulsive animal cruelty.

The clearly Italian ‘Arthur Davis’ leads an expedition into Africa and South America to document the primitive rites of the indigenous people, the titular brutes and savages. His modus operandi is to tip up to a remote village and ask for the head man’s permission to film some notorious ritual that the tribe are famous for. When the chief refuses (perhaps because he is frightened of Arthur’s salmon safari suit) Arthur makes the culturally insensitive decision to go ahead and film it anyway, at which point we cut to some faked footage that goes on for ages. Don’t worry though:  ‘all scenes, whether actual or simulated, represents actual truth’.

This truth includes a turtle having its throat cut, a goat being decapitated, a llama having its heart removed and numerous scenes of birds and animals killing and eating each other. 

Oh, and a monkey gets put on a fire. 

The whole thing peaks very early on, with a bizarre sequence in which African tribesmen are forced to wade through a river as part of their initiation into manhood. Using stock footage, blatant re-enactment and a series of unconvincing models, the film makers stage a fatal crocodile attack, including jump cuts to footage featuring a different man battling a plastic croc in what looks like a California swimming pool. It’s pathetic, especially the fake hands and fake head stuffed in the fake reptiles fake mouth. Worryingly for the viewer, this is the highlight of the film, and there is still an hour and fifteen minutes left to run.

It's a long haul to the end, although we do get to see men simulate sex with llamas and get a sneak peek at South America’s most important collection of ‘erotic pottery’ (Arthur takes great pleasure in pointing out the penises). Mostly, however, it’s quite boring, interspersed with uneasy moments of graphic nastiness. On the plus side, the music is by Riz Ortalini, and is excellent, although sadly unavailable at present, which is just fucking typical. 

In the end analysis, the narrator (the recently deceased Richard Johnson, slumming it to the extent that he is virtually a homeless, meth addicted derelict) asks if these ‘brutes and savages’ are really any worse than us so-called sophisticates. Is slowly sawing out the throat of a turtle any different to killing a chicken? Does having deep freezes and TVs make us better people? Aren’t we all really brutes and savages at heart?

He’s got a point.

But, unfortunately, he chose to make it in this film.

EVERYBODY AND EVERYTHING WAS DOING IT ALL THE TIME

We really miss the 70s.

SHIT BEAST

We couldn't decide whether this unpleasant and hungry looking creature was a cat, a dog, a mutated rabbit, a 'mind spider' or a Taiwanese poster for 'Gremlins' before realising that it was just a rubbish painting and not worth the six and a half hours we'd just spent arguing about it.

DEVIL DOG

Peter Haining must have written or edited about two billion books in his lifetime and yet, when he died in 2007, he was still only 67 years old. He remains a hero to anyone who grew up in the last forty years in the grip of a worryingly intense obsession with mystery, monsters and the macabre - and, of course, for lovers of massive, angry dogs with comedy teeth. 

Amazing, indeed. Not sure if a car can legally 'murder' but, yeah, everything else seems plausible. 

ALL KINDS OF ANIMALS

‘Wild Beasts’ is a Italian film from 1984 which is cagily set in ‘a Northern European city’, even though the next shot immediately establishes the location as Frankfurt, here shown as a sleazy place of pollution and drug abuse, a shithole littered with dirty foam, plastic bags and discarded syringes. We’ve been to Frankfurt, by the way, and it is an exceptionally clean, almost sterile place, although our main memory of it is apple based food stuffs and strong beer. In reality, of course, the film was shot mainly in Italy and, apparently, South Africa.  

A somewhat late entry into the ‘nature runs amuck’ sub-genre of seventies films that combined ecological concerns with exploitation tropes,  i.e. nature takes revenge against the human s who are fucking up the planet, the film soon moves on to a question that has plagued mankind for many years: what would happen if zoo animals were given PCP? Funnily enough, it turns out to not be a particularly good idea although, in the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that the dose had been administered by accident, through the city’s drug tainted water.

When there is a power cut, the creature’s electronic cages spring open, and the hopped up lions and tigers and bears get out and start tearing apart the zoo keepers, and angry elephants smash through the outer wall and start rampaging down the streets and stomping on people’s heads. There’s all sorts of genuinely surreal juxtapositions and assorted fun to be had at first: a cheetah chases a Volkswagen Beetle, a tiger gets onto the tube, a herd of oxen smash up a pinball arcade. In an unforgivable move, however, the film makers make the apes and monkeys sit it out, thereby missing a stupendous opportunity to create the greatest film ever made. But that’s not the only negative.  

The film is often quite astonishing in how closely it places actors and animals together, especially the stunt men, who allow themselves to be wrestled to the ground by hyenas and swatted around by lions on a very regular basis. The suspicion that health and safety rules were not strictly adhered to is confirmed almost immediately when lead perm John Aldrich (playing a character called Rupert) puts a huge tiger in a playful headlock and, later, there is a quite terrifying scene in which an angry polar bear closely pursues some children down a corridor, presumably while an ‘animal expert’ had him in the sights of a high calibre rifle. 

Unforgivably, there are also a number of sequences in which the animals are clearly in distress and, worst of all, scenes of actual, quantifiable cruelty, including live rats being torched with a flame thrower and big cats being let into a pen with cows and pigs and horses and filmed as they attack and kill their terrified prey.  That’s some unnecessary shit any way you slice it, and clearly indicates that there are beasts behind the camera as well as in front of it.

In the end, as it always bloody does, the PCP wears off, and the animals go back to their usual cuddly, compliant selves (Aldrich tickles the blood stained belly of the previously murderous polar bear, and the happy creature rolls around making contented noises). In a stupid twist ending, it is revealed that children have been drinking the Angel Dust laced water, and have gone kill crazy, too. It all gets sorted out, of course, although, this time, a flamethrower is not employed.