Friday 6 April 2012

Savage Man Savage Filmmaker

This film was a... documentary? back in 1975. The blurb on IMDB reads: A notorious mondo film depicting unbelievable and bizarre rituals, animal killing and cruelty, and people being killed and eaten, all by either animals or humans against each other or themselves.

Now, fine, I may be jaded, and this may or may not be society's fault, but... this didn't shock me at all. It might be because nature documentaries show stuff like this now. It may be that I can't tell reality any more, and this seemed about as real as an episode of Top Gear. I found a lot of the sequences with humans hard to accept as real when you take into account that there's a FILM CREW right there. They already admit they set up some nature shots, and I have no reason to believe they didn't wait and cherry pick moments like other shows do. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the 'tribal rituals' were carefully recreated... via paying the tribes money to enact some old ritual they'd heard about!

There's one sequence that gets talked about, a guy getting mauled by lions... yes, it is possible that this did happen, no faking, and that it was filmed... but that it was then included in this movie without it being clear that it was real? Either done for money, meaning the family was thinking about that, or that it is indeed not as actual as portrayed.

Ultimately, yeah, I'm not even buying this as shocking for the time. People weren't stupid 30 odd years ago, so no reason to think they weren't aware of what was really going on out in the world. This movie does slap at some nature films, and does make a point about stupidity of people, but it's more crafted than random footage slapped together...

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