Mondo Cane

The film that named a genre and set its rotten template. A globe-trotting tour of real and staged customs, cruelties and deaths, narrated in tones of appalled fascination, and an international hit that even produced an Oscar-nominated song.

Much of it is faked and all of it is framed to make the foreign look grotesque, which is the colonial gaze in its purest commercial form. It matters here as the ancestor of the whole mondo line and, eventually, the cannibal cycle.

A historically important film that is also frequently indefensible.