Very well executed

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

A lot of fun.

This was a documentary film featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but I was surprised to find out it was rated the lowest rating by the critics, one out of five stars, so I had to see why that was. Basically the title is translated as "world of dogs", or alternatively "a dog's life", it is not for a reason, and narrated by Stefano Sibaldi this is a documentary without any specific subject, it was made to shock, so it is obviously called a "shockumentary". Throughout the film are many random images where the filmmakers have travelled around the world and found the surreal, bizarre, upsetting, disgusting, perverted, inhuman and unthinkable things people and cultures do. This includes dogs in a dog pound, a tribe on an island man-hunting, a naval ship with sailors spotting women in boats, a tribes woman breast feeding a baby pig, a poverty stricken tribe that have eaten humans in cannibalism, pigs being beaten and cooked and a dog cemetery with mourners wandering it. There is also an Asian community eating various breeds of dog as meat, newborn chicks painted with coloured dye and dried in an oven to be put inside easter eggs, geese force fed food with a funnel shoved down their throats, and calves being tenderised by massaging and drinking six bottles of beer a day for fattening. You also see women caged and fattened for months to be offered as wives for a dictator, fat women rolling and exercising in a gymnasium and on fat burning machines, various canned insects and animals eaten as restaurant dishes including: grasshopper, honey bees, lava worms, ants, musk rat, rattlesnake, beetles and butterfly eggs; and snakes chosen by a customer to be skinned and eaten. After this there are men making their legs bleed by hitting them with cutting glass and looking like Jesus with barbed wire wrapped around their heads, a womens lifeguard troupe marching on a beach and demonstrating rescuing staged drowning people, birds that live underground, fish living on land and in trees, and thousands of eggs on the ground that will never hatch. Following this we see a sea turtle laying its eggs and heading for sea but dying in heat going the wrong direction, an underwater cemetery full of human skulls and skeletons, sun dried fins on a beach being collected by people with missing limbs, and sharks being fed sea urchins as revenge for killing people which makes them suffocate for days and die. Afterwards is a cemetery museum filled with skull decorations, these skulls and bones being cleaned and repaired by children, a German beer house with drunken stupidity, the drunks walking home, dozing, being violent and dancing on the streets; money being burnt by people as part of a funeral to be "taken" by the deceased, and a boarding house for dying people. Finally is a large cemetery full of wrecked cars, an orchestra playing, a Hawaii travel organisation with women and tourists doing the hula, soldiers dressing as women and dancing, men cutting off live bull heads, hundreds of people running from a bull, men training for bullfighting being charged, and a crashed cargo plane on a hill where tribes people wait for some arrival (of another plane or something). I agree entirely with the critics giving the lowest of low rating for this film, but I have to admit, I did find most of it fascinating to watch, not necessarily in the good way, but I couldn't take my eyes off, but it was a disgusting documentary. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Music, Original Song for the song "More". Pretty poor!

"Mondo Cane" (1962) is an update of Homer (fl. c. 800 BC and Aesop (fl. c. 620 BC - 560 BC).....a warning to avoid the bad guys!---------------Throughout cultural history in almost all cultures, cultural leaders and artists of fame and importance warn audiences to think twice about people and situations which look good but which are dangerous and should be avoided.Two early examples are Greek authors Homer and Aesop, and the list at least from their times now thousands of years past is long, and extends to the present day, and into the art of current day cinema.Gualtiero Jacopetti, credited as the main creator of the documentary movie titled "Mondo Cane" (1962 Italy) is a recent example of Cassandra type artists/ cultural leader who scream out "Beware!" to the rest of us.Do most people get the point, take the advice of warning givers in the tradition of Homer, Aesop, and Jacopetti, and many, many others (some listed below)?No....but the warnings continue in an unending stream, and are a noticeable part of cultural history, worth respecting as a phenomenon, even if not agreed with or heeded, which mostly, warnings given by cultural leaders are not (which explains why so few people presently or ever during past history are cultural!).What's the big deal (the latest big deal) about Jacopetti and his "Mondo Cane" (1962) movie, eh?We see the beautiful people (mainly the beautiful bathing beauty girls of 1962's "White Australia") at the start of the movie contrasted with others from places like Borneo, Fiji, and Malaysia (rural Italy and sports enthusiast Portugal are also included).The message is clear...........most of the people and much of what some people in the world do is ugly, uncivilized, dangerous, and should be refused and avoided.This is not a "love thy neighbor" movie, and refusing "love for thy neighbor" is not a new theme historically.Homer's "Trojan Horse" story part of his Odyssey epic poem is an early example. Accepting the big horse outside the gates of Troy might seem like a good idea, but, in hindsight, we realize it would be better for the besieged Trojans to have left it where they found it, and best to destroy it where they found (outside the gates of Troy) if that had been practical.Two hundred years after Homer (fl. c. 800 BC), roughly, came Aesop (fl. c. 620 - 560 BC), also a Greek who also lived in present day Turkey (aka "Anatolia").Aesop gives us yet another "avoidance is best" story with his "Farmer and the Viper" fable of fame.For those who don't know, "The Farmer and the Viper" is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 51 in the Perry Index. It (Aesop's Fable) has the moral that kindness to the evil will be met by betrayal and is the source of the idiom 'to nourish a viper in one's bosom'. The story concerns a farmer who finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up and places it within his coat. The viper, revived by the warmth, bites his rescuer, who dies realizing that it is his own fault. In an alternative version, the farmer brings the viper home to warm by the fire. When it threatens his wife and children, he kills it with an axe. It is the latter version that appears in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.13) as Le villageois et le serpent; this ends with the detail that the farmer cuts the snake in three and the parts struggle to re-unite themselves.The "brotherhood of man" doesn't extend to vipers (Aesop's opinion) any more than it extends to Trojan Horses (Homer's opinion).Cultural history marched on into relatively recent times, and the cavalcade of writers giving us "Beware" type messages continued.Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, the Marquis De Sade, Darwin, Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Graham Sumner, movies of the 1960's protest era including "Mondo Cane," (1962), "Marat/ Sade" (1966), and "Zabriskie Point" (1969), and more recently William O. Wilson, Harvard University's embattled "Sociobiologist" of fame, still alive, kicking, and writing (in his 80's as of 2013) "Beware" messages to us all about the problems of "Inclusionism" in the same spirit as Homer urged us to avoid (i.e. "don't include) Trojan Horses.It's up to us to choose........the Australian bathing beauty girls or the Borneo people (who take up much more of "Mondo Cane" 's screen time, so the avoidance point Jacopetti makes is all the more emphatically made......ignored though it was in the "brotherhood of man" historical period which came immediately after the 1962 release of the "Mondo Cane" movie). We are told (by some, not all) that we are "all brothers" and it's not a good (or moral) idea to avoid particular groups of people, regardless of visual and other evidence we take in. Is that true?The long train of historical (including cinematic) cultural "Cassandra's" include many who say (nay, yell loudly, as Jacopetti does in "Mondo Cane" 1962), "No, it is not true, and don't be taken in by the tidal waves of copious propaganda urging otherwise for self-interested, hidden agenda reasons (often not identified or discussed by the warning givers)."Only the wise survive......... most of the time. Be wise.........it can't hurt.-------------------------Tex (David) Allen is a SAG-AFTRA actor who has written many reviews of books and movies.Email: [email protected]

If you are into movies like "Cannibal Holocaust", "Caligula" or "Faces of Death", probably you will find this "documentary" interesting. Otherwise, if you are not into this kind of films, you will find this gross, tedious, disgusting, exploitative, lame, uninspired and immensely pretentious (Yes, pretentious) Because this movie, like "Caligula" dis some year later, tries too hard to be the most shocking film ever made, showing us the most unpleasant kind of scenes, one after another, but there is no beauty, there is no art in any single frame of this, only a convoluted mess that tries to show us some of the most decadent aspects of humanity in a sensationalistic way. "Mondo Cane" is a horrible film, the kind of film that I won't like to see again ever in my life.I give this one star, only because I can't rate it lower.

The first impression I have watching "Mondo Cane" for the first time in 2006 is of a sensationalist, dated, bizarre and scatological drive-in movie of the 60's. But I recall that when I was a kid, this movie was very commented in Brazil. Inclusive, our expression "mundo-cão" originated from the title of this movie. A great part of this film is a cheap exploitation of worldwide exotic costumes, most of them weird and shocking for Western civilizations, like a fake documentary with some funny observations spoken by the narrator as if they were true. But there is a few images that recalls National Geographic films, like the turtles that are misguided to the sea and die in hot sand. The Italian music score "Ti Guardero' nel Cuore" was a hit in the 60's in Brazil and it is still very beautiful. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Mundo-Cão" ("Dog World")