The Premise: Documentarians have traveled back to the antebellum southern United States during the pre-Civil War era when slavery was rampant. Their goal is to capture and expose the cruelty and horrors of the slave trade in as realistic a manner as possible. Witness slave ships with poor souls packed into the galley like sardines,…
Pulsating Peplums, Manic Mondos and Sexy Subversions: A 1960s Italian Genre Marathon
As a follow-up to my previous marathon of Italian genre films of the ’70s, I thought I’d step back in time and do the same for the swinging ’60s. While the blood and gore might not be as generous in this decade, the Italians still hopped from genre to genre with shameless aplomb, latching onto…
Mondo Balordo (Severin/ Something Weird) Blu-ray review
The Mondo subgenre is one of the more unusual sides of exploitation filmmaking. It became popular after the surprise success of 1962’s Mondo Cane. The films are usually “documentaries” of strange things around the world with the aim of being shocking. Most of these films happen to be fake with less than conviving dramatized footage….