Shockumentaries
Disturbing, exploitative and cynical documentaries with snide or sarcastic remarks on shocking or strange subjects, usually real-life gore, death, violence or bizarre customs, societies, rituals and cultures. Although this genre originally started as real documentaries with a point to make, the genre spawned dozens of imitators, followers and enthusiasts who sometimes resorted to faking or reconstructing scenes of death and violent rituals, filming bizarre sexual scenes, or simply compiling real gruesome footage, and it all rapidly deteriorated into sensationalism, vulgarity and exploitation of the worst kind over the decades. Also arguably responsible for the Cannibal movie craze and other sensationalist genres.
The most famous series amidst the scores of shockumentaries are the original Mondo series and Faces of Death. Standout names are Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi who made the original Mondo Cane and a series of follow-ups, all focusing on a crazy society around the world, the underrated Antonio Climati who was cinematographer for the originals and then made a series of interesting Mondo films based on man vs. nature, and the more exploitative Alfredo Castiglioni who made a series of Mondos based on bizarre and shocking customs and rituals in primitive cultures.
Scare Films
A series of short educational movies from the 70s designed to scare the youth in schools regarding driving, sex, Christian morals, drugs, strangers, etc.
The movies often showed the horrifying consequences of each act including burned bodies after drunk driving, blistered genitals infected with VDs,
bad dates, deformed babies, etc etc. All the series have been released by Something Weird videos.
A good compilation of some incredible and extreme footage that they banned from news reports. Contains many brutal or incredible accidents, violent police videos, executions, crimes, and some odds and ends like wild concert footage and sex crimes. Obviously only for people interested in this sort of thing but if you are, the compilation keeps it interesting with a variety of subjects, it doesn't obsess over gore or exploitation, the narration is practical, and the only flaw is the silly sex footage. Try the 'Best Of' release.
The movie that started it all. 40 years old and the tagline still holds. This movie will make you laugh, it will depress, shock, and provoke you into doubting the sanity of society and man, both modern and primitive. This documentary brilliantly compares primitive with modern customs showing the absurdity and inseparability of both. Geese and women are force fed, primitive woman is fattened and modern woman tortures her fat body, some cultures revere dogs while others eat them, Asians may eat snakes with a gourmet's eye but New York's finest do the same with insects, military rituals dress their soldiers in women's clothes and decapitate animals, one culture both feeds and takes brutal revenge on sharks, etc, etc. Hilarious, provocative and unforgettable without the vulgarity of the rest.
By the cinematographer of the original Mondo team comes this underrated documentary, faithful to the original Mondo magic. While the bar had already been raised at the time, showing and exploiting extreme violence, gore and sexual acts, this one is relatively more restrained and consists of hilarious social satire and weird customs in addition to compiling shocking scenes of savagery. The scenes are almost all interesting, and include alligator hunting in New York sewers, animal hunts where the prey fight back, fakirs that cut off their tongues, a sexual disorder treatment where couples are encouraged to rape each other, brutal tribal abortions, white aborigines, a firing squad, slave trading, etc etc.
Three years in the making, this fascinating and amazing documentary by the makers of Mondo Cane almost ranks with the best documentaries but sometimes has difficulty transcending the exploitation genre. It explores in graphic detail the consequences of colonial abandonment by the British and French in Africa where racism and exploitation was replaced by another even more extreme form of racism and brutality. Whites, Muslims and animals are all massacred with unbelievable brutality and in huge numbers, with soldiers, revolutionaries and mercenaries only adding to the chaos. Under risk of life, the film-makers managed to catch a brutal period in time in amazing detail and they show the gore, exploitation and deaths unflinchingly.
A classic short documentary from 1949 by Georges Franju and arguably the first shockumentary ever made. Slaughterhouses are explored, city life juxtaposed with gory butchery performed by bored professionals in death factories in the outskirts of town. A horse, cows and sheep are violently killed, cut open and chopped up before you can blink, complete with rivers of blood and gruesome headless twitching bodies. Accompanied by a compassionate and artistically French narration. This was the first and most extreme in a series of short documentaries by Franju that exhibit his personal outrages against war and other various subjects before he turned to fiction.
Due to the lack of translation for this Russian bizarro, this review will be based only on the visuals. The first part features freakish surgery with intense gore, including grafting toes on a hand instead of fingers, and heart and brain surgery with strange instruments. The second part serves lots of footage on siamese twins, their embryonic development, growing up and separation. The last part seems to tie things together along with footage of insects, surgery and a female model doing weird things. The whole movie is spliced together with psychedelic colors and images and feels like a grotesque offspring of biology, life and science. A documentary from another planet, like living inside a Dali painting.
A professional documentary about the history of executions since the day the French decided to make them more humane. This one is researched and comprehensive and compares executions around the world, including civilized countries like the USA and France, and events in Russia, China and the Holocaust (where humane executions meant making it easier for the executioners). Facts and figures stare at you from the screen, but nothing speaks louder than actual brutal executions captured on film and this is what the film-makers make use of to present their case against the death penalty. So the shocks are carefully used, there is no exploitation and the presentation is professional. The only problem I had with this one is the bleeding heart approach (death is terrible, therefore we shouldn't kill), and the lack of opinions from the other side.
After the wave of Mondo style documentaries, this one started a new wave of extreme exploitation of real-life death and gore. It is also the precursor to some of the reality shows and violent blooper collections. It was banned in over 40 countries and even became a kind of urban legend. The film shows scores of scenes involving death and corpses, both animal and human. Explored are autopsies, slaughters, assassinations, executions, hunts, suicides, etc. The scenes are edited close together and a narrator remarks on his quest to come to terms with death and how the things he saw affected his life, but the comments are mostly superficial or uninteresting. The stand-out scenes include pitbull fighting, slaughterhouses, a headless chicken, the infamous monkey brain restaurant where the customer beats the monkey to death, a crocodile killing and mutilating a man, and an electrocution. Several scenes are re-enacted or obviously fake, others are still being argued about as to their authenticity, but the movie effectively portrays and exploits death whether they are fake or not. Only worth watching as a pioneering 'classic' but is actually very overrated.
The final release by the Mondo Cane team. This one is a pseudo 'documentary' or basically a re-enactment of what film-makers would see if they travelled back in time to a Southern plantation at the peak of slavery. Based on research, this features historical characters, events and tries to depict real accounts of the endless degradation and inhuman treatment of the slaves. Even more than with Africa Addio however, it has difficulties transcending the exploitative and crude nature of the film-makers, the graphic detail of humiliation and endless masses of naked black flesh submitted to rotten lodgings, food, cleansing, breeding, rape, etc seems unnecessary and exaggerated yet at the same time brutally brings modern softened viewpoints of slavery back to reality.
MTV-spawned collection of short pieces showcasing seriously disturbed young people putting themselves in harm's way for entertainment. They apply paper cuts between their toes, pick fights with a wrestling champion, stick objects up their anuses, tease alligators, replace test-dummies with their own bodies, strip or take dumps in stores, and sniff wasabi into their noses at sushi bars. And this is only a sample of the insanity. Extremely outrageous, rude, disturbed and hilarious.
A collection of freakish people doing real and dangerous acts. Includes lifting heavy weights on various body piercings, bloodless piercing of the voice box, cheeks and other body parts, a man who eats live insects and worms, sword-swallowing, passing a condom through the nose and out the mouth, pumping a sickening cocktail of beer, chocolate and ketchup through a tube into someone's stomach and back out again(!), stomping a guy's face into broken glass, etc. Stomach-churning entertainment to be watched only on a dare.
Relatively less shocking, but controversial enough to get banned and become a cult item. This fascinating documentary catalogues the over-the-top and sensational violence in America, starting promisingly with eye-opening statistics but soon focusing on political assassinations, wackos and serial murderers. Unfortunately, the movie only goes as far as to say that something is wrong with America and doesn't have the balls or the intelligence to start pointing fingers. What keeps this fascinating is the rare collection of great footage of various interviews, brutal or disturbing moments caught on film, and news reports that all add up to one depressingly twisted society.
Another exploitative Mondo-style documentary about all strange things African with a silly narrative that endlessly preaches about the old vs the modern. Explored here are diseases, animal hunting and preying, huge snakes & spiders, witch doctors, primitive lifestyles and habits like a drink made of urine and blood, and the ultimate incredible finds: an illegal skull operation where the entire top of the head is cut open, scraped away and a hole is made into the skull, all without anasthesia or stitches, and... an actual virgin sacrifice.
This lackluster sequel features more of the same only this time their heart wasn't in it. There's too much social commentary as opposed to amazing events, some of the sequences feel set-up, and there are several filler or leftover scenes. That said however it's still entertaining and fascinating at times, featuring things like religious fanatics, live bugs as food and jewelry, a slapping symphony, a festival for head bashing, slave-trading, etc. See it once.
From the Castiglioni team who specialize in shocking, primitive cultures and who film them mondo style. This one focuses on strange, disgusting and violent habits, ceremonies, hygiene practices, and social behaviours in primitive cultures around the world. Tribesmen wash in urine directly from the animal, clobber each other on the head for infidelity, remove uvulas, cut out an elephant's eyes before carving it up, breast-feed dogs, disembowel their prey, eat spiders, perform so-called psychic surgery, cut off fingers to heal migraines, deflower virgins so that they can become nuns, hang themselves by hooks, etc. A mixed bag of interesting, disgusting, extreme and exploitative scenes backed by a somewhat overly-dramatic and pretentious narration.
Well where else can you find a slew of people, shows and practices so weird, it deserves its own Mondo documentary? Explore the underworld of New York freaks where men bite off mice heads in front of an audience, people prance naked in front of a mentally disabled man while reciting poetry and wrapping themselves in saran wrap, and a female performer pours sticky fluid and glitter over her naked body while ranting in a shrieking voice at an audience. Watch various performance artists in outrageous costumes, hilarious street comics, alley and street characters ranting and reciting, cock-fights, sex acts, s&m clubs, voodoo cults, etc. Like most good Mondos, you're never sure how much is fake but it's entertaining.
Everything you wanted to know about New Guinea tribes but National Geographic didn't show you. Strange rituals and customs, painful piercings, ritualistic mutilations, tattoos, the treatment and worship of the rotting corpses of their relatives, the hunting, killing and carving of animals, marriage rituals, homosexuality, genital appendages, drugs, and finally, the hunt for the alleged cannibal tribes hiding in the jungles where skulls, death and disease abound, but no actual cannibalism. A rare mondo-style Italian/Japanese production.
From the talent behind the original Mondo movies comes this focused documentary on man's relationship with nature and animals. The contention is that nature is more savage to nature than man is, and vice versa. So hunters are compared to hippies, animal deaths to senseless human killings, and plenty of deaths are shown in detail, the deaths meted out for various reasons. Highlights include lions mauling a man who got too close with his camera, ritualistic European hunts, animals fighting amongst each other, tribes that have sex with the ground, hippies that breast feed goats and a death squad that mutilates their fellow countrymen. This one is relatively more exploitative and brutally shocking than Climati's other work and the commentary gets a little too snide at times. There is too much gratuitous nudity and some scenes feel fake (like the castration and European hunt). But the cinematography is great and the conceptual focus keeps it interesting.
A first Mondo from Castiglioni focusing on strange, shocking, gross and exotic customs and rituals in Africa. Examples: Burying an old man alive, dung as a secret ingredient, brutal body art and self-mutilation, graphic circumcision (both male and female), rituals involving burying then decapitating an animal, eating bugs, choking and torturing dogs as part of a ritual, graphic and strange rituals for every aspect of the body including menstruation, mating, sex and birth, etc. Most of these seem undeniably real but the narration and exploitation sometimes raise doubts. As irony, it then compares all of this to Christian rituals, and modern society, technology and gory surgery. This is an Africa they never show us. For strong stomachs only.
A professional, fascinating but sick little documentary about a man who suffered from cystic fibrosis, but instead of dying at the age of 20 like everyone else, he lived to be 43. This he managed by embracing the suffering and becoming a performing masochist, and marrying a dominatrix. This is not a sleazy, insane or idiotic character however, but a confident, socially charming and entertaining man who just happens to nail his penis to a wooden board and gets cut up, sewn, burnt, electrocuted, sodomized, etc etc while writing, painting and singing bawdy songs. It's not easy to judge this one.
A comprehensive documentary on carnival sideshows and the frea...I mean people that worked in them. The history of the sideshow is explored as are famous performers from the past and present such as the lobster family, half-woman, pinheads, wolf boys, siamese twins, live mouse and chicken eating geeks, monkey girl, etc. Interviews reveal what these people think before and after political correctness took over, the newer Jim Rose circus is included, and these questionable but always fascinating entertainment values are explored. Well done.
Climati's last Mondo attempts to present the theme of man vs. nature and violence that can be either 'sweet or savage' depending on the context and who is watching. But the result is somewhat forced and sloppy this time, with obviously faked scenes raising doubts about all the other seemingly real shocks. A dead Tibetan monk is gorily chopped up and fed to the vultures (a real custom), an Arab criminal is punished by his people by tearing off his arm (fake), tight-rope walkers and fatal accidents, riots, an ex-soldier turns animal-saint and dedicates his life to protecting wildlife from mines and fences, animals used brutally for human purposes, drinking of blood, then random exploitation of women working out compared to naked tribal dances, and then there's the expected gory animal butchery, animals killing animals, and people living or playing with animals, etc. The sarcastic narration crosses the border into supercilious at times.
An early Mondo series, the first of which is narrated by none other than an enthusiastic Vincent Price. A slightly more controversial Mondo for its time, featuring footage of nuclear bomb victims, practices of desperate drug-addicts, lepers, tribal customs and circumcisions, male geishas, headhunters, abuse of live animals, slavery, amputations, blood drinking, and other strange customs around the world. Somewhat entertaining classic Mondo.
A very boring collection of extreme gore that could have been filmed anywhere besides Asia. One disfigured, rotten and mutilated corpse after another is displayed in graphic detail without any narrative, each death due to various violent causes, some autopsies and abortions are zoomed into, then for the last third of the movie some footage of strange and violent customs, people and foods are tacked on. This one feels like a hardcore porn movie only its endless gore. Beyond worthless.
Scene One: a white man asks permission from a tribal elder to film them while the camera rolls, the elder raises his hand and they walk away. The narrator says something like "we gained the hard-won permission to film this tribe". Cut to a real animal death scene, then show some brief tribal customs while the narrator seems to make up some sensational explanations for them. Then: "A man who makes sexual advances to the chief's daughter must fight three men to the death", so cut to a man who sneaks up on the chief's daughter followed by a fake fight. Show another real animal death scene this time killed by humans and throw in some tribal sex and real surgery. And so on... Staged scenery, random clips and highly dubious narrative make this practically worthless, but some strange customs are real (simulated sex with a llama?) and some animal battles are good although we doubt how a jaguar would just 'fall' into a lake infested with crocodiles... Didn't Deodato attack these kinds of film-makers in Cannibal Holocaust?
Consisting of at least 4 titles (Black, Yellow, Red, End), this series lies somewhere in between the extremity of later compilations that show nothing but sickening gore and violent deaths, and the more narration-oriented and exploratory Faces of Death series. A Japanese narrator travels around the world collecting a truly varied hodge-podge of scenes including crime scenes, accidents, suicides, extreme gore, diseased and deformed babies, autopsies, twisted sex scenes and coprophilia, strange customs, small wars, etc. Slightly more interesting than the boring extreme compilations but still exploitative and unfocused. This may please fans of both camps or neither.
Another boring Asian compilation of extreme gore, featuring footage of victims' mutilated, bloated, rotting, wormy, dismembered, decapitated, and crushed bodies after violent accidents and crimes. Death Women focuses mostly on female corpses and Death Body features a segment on the holocaust.
Along with Inhumanities, this series pioneered the repulsive gruesome and gore-oriented shockumentaries of the 90s. The footage starts as historical photographs but becomes more and more gruesome, exploitative and explicit. It presents a montage of historical and famous death scenes with a grim narration by Anton Lavey (first movie only), including crime and accident-scene photos and footage, famous celebrity deaths (Kennedy etc), lots of footage of the Manson murders and murderers, various scenes of executions and gangster killings, gory dead soldiers in various wars, the gruesome deaths of a man and two children on the set of the Twilight Zone repeated in slow-motion, an infamous live suicide on TV. And then, gradually they simply throw together whatever they could find that involves death including abortion footage, exhumations, air-show disasters and even freaks. Exploitation of the worst kind.
South American compilation of car accident footage, half video, half photo-montage of smashed cars, pile-ups and lots of dead, crushed and disfigured, gory bodies. Supposedly a scare video to get people to drive properly featuring very little narration. As dull as it gets.
Mattei's Mondo-style documentary on all things perverse around the world featuring the usual staged acts mixed with possibly real footage. Laura Gemser undresses, narrates and serves as the only link to the Emanuelle series. The collection includes exhibitionism, nude roller-skating, rituals with knives, a Lady Godiva who gets friendly with her horse, a magician who makes a penis appear on a woman, castration and genital surgery, etc.
A pseudo-documentary splicing together stock footage of various political events throughout the world, and fake acting. The movie jumps from one violent or clandestine event to another in Cuba, Bolivia, Italy, Vietnam, Chile, the only common thread being some kind of American CIA and business involvement. In between, people are shown to be shot and tortured in nasty ways. I presume this is a propaganda film, but without backgrounds and coherency, this mess becomes a torture of its own.
Compared to the first, these feel less Mondo-like and not so memorably strange, and involve a lot more real news footage, as well as the usual aimless compilation of staged re-enactments (sometimes quite realistic), real corpses and animal slaughters. The second moderately entertaining film features many accidents, stunts, the death of a boxer, war footage, a dolphin slaughter, etc, the third is mostly a very boring selection of criminal re-enactments with the usual death stuff only appearing towards the end, and the fourth features a new cheesy narrator obviously added for tasteless chuckles while lots of disturbing news footage, some good re-enactments and gory slaughters take place. In the end, these are just random and exploitative compilations and since only some of the scenes are staged, the only thing to do while watching is to try to figure out which are real. Beware of different versions containing repackaging and re-editing of footage.
An obscure hodge-podge collection of death scenes. The compilations include fake re-enactments, real and extreme Asian gore, and some international violence and 'inhumanities' usually taken from other releases. The first is half fake, half real gore and accident scenes with a low-key narrator. The second is all real and contains endless Asian footage of various mutilated, dismembered, squashed, decapitated, and rotting corpses filmed on real accident and crime scenes with no narration. This delivers amazingly extreme and raw material for gorehounds, but it's boring and pointless for the rest of us. The third is mostly news footage or international death scenes many of which are featured on other compilations.
This series mixes an exagerrated campy commentary from later Faces of Death movies with some of the extreme Asian gore footage that seems to be spreading everywhere, and puts them together in the most extreme form of exploitation ever made. The gore includes aftermath footage of brutal accidents, suicides and murders with horribly mutilated corpses. What sets these movies aside is the juvenile commentary by one 'Vincent Van Gore' who makes very tasteless jokes about the horrible deaths, makes comments like how a pregnant woman who was mutilated in an accident shouldn't have stayed single, gets excited or aroused over some of the scenes, and delivers a campy narration in general. Sick and uninteresting.
A hodgepodge compilation of various violent or gory scenes that truly scrapes the bottom of the barrel or blatantly steals from other shockumentaries. Edited together sloppily are scenes of accidents, rescues, tribal violence, WWII footage, animal killings, riots, bulls, endless autopsies, etc. The gore is sparse, the scenes are mostly uninteresting, and the narration only says dumb obvious things instead of explaining what we are looking at.
Once upon a time there was an antisocial maniac who hated everything except exhibitionism, coprophilia, urophilia and violence. He kept getting arrested and was hated by everyone. Normally he would have been just another animal in prison but since he did all this on stage and literally ate and threw feces at people as part of his punk rock act, he got fans and this documentary.
The missing link between the Mondo documentaries and the sensational gore-oriented shockumentaries that flooded into the market in the 90s. This one poses as a documentary about atrocities committed worldwide but is just another sensationalist and bad collection of assorted accidents, gore, lots of war footage, some plagiarism on Mondo movies, assassinations and executions. The narrative delivers detailed information for one scene then disappears in the next and the music is annoying, breezy classical music. Later shockumentaries ripped off material from these.
Castiglioni comes back for a third round with his patented shocking primitive culture Mondos, only this time with almost nothing new except the level of extremity. Once again we get to see graphic circumcisions, self-mutiliation as body art, animal slaughter, bizarre and shocking rituals, nasty rotting corpses and burial rituals, and punishment of people by cutting off their penis, only this time its mostly splatter or porn. Courtship dances with naked tribes-people are compared to strippers and pornography, extreme African body art is compared to even more extreme plastic surgery as the body is sliced apart, stretched, mutilated and changed to suit the culture's aesthetics, there's random customs and nasty hygiene practices in primitive, obscure tribes, and even a disturbing sex ritual with a crying child. This Mondo makes its point but it's nothing we havent heard before, and in ways that don't make us lose our dinner. This one possibly inspired the Cannibal movies and the extreme gore-oriented shockumentaries that would come much later.
The last from Castiglioni who seems to only want to up the level of gore and sickness with every release. And it all seems and looks real too. More barbaric and violent customs on parade here including many sloppy circumcisions, camel castration, artful and bloody body mutilation, brutal animal sacrifices, snake and scorpion bites, pornographic sexual rites, one involving a snake, and more... A very extreme Mondo that feels even more brutal and nasty than the boring splatter documentaries of the 90s.
A documentary about transexuals, their troubles, body features and surgeries in graphic detail by the queen of absolutely terribly movies: Doris Wishman. The film achieved notoriety for its hardcore transexual genitalia and real surgery but the acting, editing, dubbing and writing is painfully bad.
A boring series of eight compilations with various news footage and accident aftermath police tapes. There is no extreme gore, the narration is sparse and minimal and the footage is just regular death & violence stuff you see on TV, only more condensed. Features victims of shootings, suicides, war, crashes, robberies, murders, violent international & political situations (some of them well known), riots, executions, a crucifixion, etc.
This documentary meanders around the world exploring various forms of treatments for the dying and the dead. Funeral rites and ceremonies are shown, as are graphic treatments and various resting places for the corpses, the dying share their thoughts, animals are slaughtered, corpses are opened, embalmed, a man is operated on, and another man is executed, etc. This one is not designed for shocks but it exploits and shows unnecessary morbid and graphic scenes, and in the end, it really has nothing interesting to say.
Sex, Blood and Mutilation
See Joe Christ.
For the first couple of entries, this series features a horribly condescending, preachy and puerile narrative, and many of the so-called shocks are merely exotic or even plain cultural habits which have been exaggerated or twisted into something strange. It documents things like ritualistic, bloodless piercings, trances beyond pain, cults and religions, exotic foods, snake charmers, sexuality, poverty, disease, prostitution, midget wrestling etc. Then, inexplicably, it explores the world of transexuality and sex-change operations with graphic detail. The sequels explore similar subjects such as sex clubs, more midgets, cremations, healers, leprosy, piercings, various sleazy sexploitations, mummies, sharks, rituals, etc. From the third entry on, it becomes more explicit and obscure, showing various bizarre forms of sexual entertainment and mondo-style, amusingly weird or disgusting rituals. The narrative remains childish however.
Everything in shockumentaries and the kitchen sink. That's the approach in this series that features scenes of accidents, suicides, violence, riots, murders, gory aftermaths, surgery, executions, wild stunts, mutilations, deformities, piercings, rituals, etc. You're watching wild car stunts one minute and splattering head crushes the next. One of the most extreme series ever made in my opinion, not because it has wall-to-wall gore like other series, but because it doesn't bore you with the same gore over and over again, some of the gore includes live people (not just gory aftermaths), genital mutilation/surgery, and some of the footage is the most extreme, cringe-inducing, shocking and repulsive yet. It's all real this time, avoiding the pitfalls of Faces of Death. The second is the least extreme, and the fourth the most extreme. The bad: Obviously the cheap exploitation of true death is offensive, the editing is bad, the footage is gritty and of bad quality but that can't be helped and actually adds to the effect, and the silly, cheesy narrative is the worst ever, using voice distortion effects and extremely dumb comments. The best thing by far is the death metal soundtrack that starts from II onwards and is very appropriate, serving to enhance the brutality of the series. This delivers to fans of the genre although I am not one of them.
Another in the run of extreme gore shockumentaries released after the Faces of Death that compiles sickening footage for no good reason. This one upped the ante, subsequently getting banned everywhere. Included are stiff and rotting corpses, extreme S&M footage involving cutting, live animal roasting and operating, exploration of morbidly sick art-work, music and people that involve death, real autopsies, Hitler and concentration camps, the atom bomb and horrible consequences of radiation burns, etc.
Yet another endlessly boring compilation of extremely gruesome gore taken exclusively from real footage of post-accident and violent carnage. The gore is as extreme as it gets, the soundtrack consists of spooky ambient keyboards, and the silly narration is almost non-existent, spoken through a distortion box by a gentleman in a gimp mask and outfit who delivers the occasional maniacal laugh.
Not really shocking but made by the Mondo Cane people. This includes some obvious or silly social commentary on absurd female customs and personalities around the world including the extremes of slavery and polyandry, lesbianism, Israeli soldiering, prostitution, etc. The best scene is the one where widows hide and run between falling artillery shells to grab the scrap metal and later sell it for a few cents.
Chinese Faces of Gore that shows crime scenes with mostly mutilated corpses or victims of murders and then explores Thai virgin marriage rituals and finally, footage of people that dig up their relatives' decomposing corpses to cut off the skin and wash the bones. Everything is presented using cheap sensationalist or pointlessly obvious narrative and even the more interesting subjects become exploitative and dull when the camera lingers for 20 minutes on the corpses.