Showing posts with label Brutes and Savages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brutes and Savages. Show all posts
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Who Are the Brutes and Who Are the Savages? An open letter to one Mark Goodall regarding his treatment of the film Brutes and Savages
Dearest Mr. Goodall,
We here at The Mondo Research Laboratories do hereby take issue with your treatment of the film Brutes and Savages (e.g. "a silly charade"), its director Arthur Davis (e.g. "the most monstrous, untamed ego in the entire history of the sub-genre"), and those within the film (e.g. "poorly staged and terribly acted") in your tome on mondo cinema entitled Sweet & Savage: The World Through The Shockumentary Film Lens (2006 [ISBN: 1900486490], pp. 35-38), and hold that through the withholding, manipulating, and outright lying about the various facets of the film you thus present a skewed and inaccurate portrait of the aforementioned director, the film, and the various peoples therein. Whether this is due to 'mere' gross negligence and ineptitude or intentional deception designed to unfairly and inaccurately disparage the film, of course cannot be known with absolute certainty by anyone but you, if anyone at all; nonetheless, the all-too-convenient case being that every time a fact is omitted, its omission serves to benefit your underlying thesis--that Davis is a "fraudster" and the film a "silly charade"--leads us to believe that said omissions, which serve to reinforce a consistent and malignant bias against the film and the involved parties, are quite intentional, indeed. But regardless of what the ultimate cause of these various argumentatively convenient factual gaps and manipulations (which you can find outlined at some length below) may be, if you cannot provide an honest depiction of the film you aim to discuss, then you sir have absolutely no business writing about it. Such despicably erroneous mudslinging masquerading as film critique has no place in a serious study of mondo cinema, and we will not sit idly by and let you attempt to steamroll the mondo landscape into acquiescence with your deluded, ill-informed pontifications on the subject we hold dear.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Brutes and Savages - Synapse vs Gorgon/MPI
When Synapse released the 'uncivilized' version of Brutes and Savages (1977) a few years back (2003), they wrote that this version was a whopping 15 minutes longer (for a total of 107 minutes) than the previous US release of the film (a Gorgon/MPI VHS, which clocks in at around 92 minutes). The fact that a version is longer, though, does not necessarily mean that it contains all of the content found in the shorter version and then some, as it is certainly possible for a longer version of a film to contain alternate scenes which take the place of scenes found in a shorter version.
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