June 13: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Animals! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

There are a lot of people who reckon with the art versus artist and worlds of troubling media all the time. Like, well, me. Because if you watch a lot of Italian cinema eventually you will come across a very casual — one would say cruel — attitude about the way animals are treated in their exploitation cinema. From the way horses are thrown around in their Westerns to mondo and cannibal films that are outright celebrations of butchery, Italian cinema can test one’s love of nature. Then again, you go and eat processed meat for dinner and enable an incredibly more brutal industry, so perhaps we all have something to atone for.

Regardless, the first time I watched The Wild Beasts, I made it as far as the credits, where a horse’s parts — including its head and out of mouth tongue — are cut to pieces on camera and served to several wild cats. It jarred me so much that I just couldn’t deal with anything after.

Years later, I feel that my explorations into the dark heart of the cinema of my home country have scarred me to feelings like this. After all, this movie was directed by Franco E. Prosperi, who was part of the team with Gualtiero Jacopetti that popularized the mondo genre. The only fictional movie that Prosperi ever made, Wild Beasts is a rough watch but in no way as senses destroying as the other movies Prosperi had a hand in making, such as the two Mondo Cane films, Africa Blood and Guts or perhaps the most upsetting movie I’ve ever endured, Goodbye Uncle Tom.

But he’s going to try.

There have been ecohorror movies before and animal attacks shared as horror. But when you hear “Italian animal attack movie,” you worry that you just might not be able to deal with what you get.

Wild Beasts starts with what we Italian film lovers affectionately refer to as bullshit science. PCP has been released in the water supply of Frankfort and is mostly concentrated in the zoo. That means that every animal there that drinks water has found itself in a severe psychotic state where they feel no pain, experience time differently and are floating in a haze. They also have decided that this is when humanity must pay, like Day of the Animals but way, way worse.

This would be a big problem already, but then there’s also the issue of the new computerized security system at the zoo. Of course it fails, because technology always fails in animal attack movies. And even if it didn’t, the elephants have lost their minds and rampage through a wall, unleashing an entire jungle of apex predators into the streets where they’re free to shred people into the same kind of meat as that horse. Now, I cheer that on while the horse bothers me, but I also know that for the most part, the stunts didn’t scar people for life or kill anyone. This wasn’t Roar, a movie where every single member of the cast and crew was nearly killed and Melanie Griffith was scalped.

The movie also begins with a quote from Francis Thrive that says “Our madness engulfs everything and infects innocent victims such as children or animals.” Again, if you’ve watched enough Italian genre movies, you start to understand that their creators have a propensity to not only make up quotes, they even make up authors. This high minded introduction to a low minded movie doesn’t come from some great philosopher. Francis Thrive is Franco E. Prosperi. Thanks for confirming my suspicions, Bleeding Skull.

From here on lies animal madness. After a short setup — we meet zoologist Dr. Rupert Berner (Antonio Di Leo) as he works with the big cats he meets reporter Laura Schwarz (Lorraine De Selle, who really endured the worse of Italy’s excesses in movies like Cannibal Ferox, Emanuelle in America, Violence in a Women’s Prison and its sister film Women’s Prison Massacre, House On the Edge of the Park, the Joe Dallesandro-starring Madness and S. S. Extermination Camp), a mother that obviously hates her deranged daughter Suzy (Louisa Lloyd) who keeps calling her and making noises on the phone with her frog puppet. How much does she despise her child? A line of dialogue in this movie is “Children are extraterrestrials that come from outer space to destroy their parents.”

From here on out, all is lost. A couple batter-dipping the corn dog in the back of a car are swarmed by rats — which also destroy a cat and in no way does that scene seem fake — and killed. The only way to stop these rats is with flamethrowers and yes, this being Italian cinema, I believed that every rat set ablaze and stomped was real, just like in Rats: The Night of Terror, the only film I’ve seen that equal this level of human on rat and rat on human trauma.

Yet the animal wilding is not done yet. No, a cheetah runs wild through the streets — this is set up to look like perhaps Seattle at times and says its Frankfort and a “northern European city” but it’s really Rome and Hamburg — as an entire army of animals stampedes down the empty shopping districts in near surreal moments. The cheetah catches up to a woman in a Volkswagen bug which leads to this line of what should be award-winning writing:

Inspector Nat Braun: Is she out of her mind?

Dr. Rupert Berner: No she’s not crazy, she’s being chased by a cheetah!

The woman slams into another car and is burned up to the point that she looks like she’s possessed. These two learned men just pick her limp body up and throw it in the back of their car while the cheetah keeps running about, joined by hyenas that attack a slaughterhouse — yes, that’s really a pig being destroyed and you may wonder, “Well, it was going to get sliced up by humans,” but do you need to justify this any more? — and elephants stomp an airplane to pieces and a tiger gets loose inside a subway car.

Here’s where you can cheer, as an elephant stepped on Prosperi’s foot during the filming of the airport sequence. And the tiger got loose in the subway station and hid in a bathroom before deciding to go on top of a train. And Di Leo was nearly decapitated by the polar bear that wanders through the hallways of a school. Anything for art, right? Or sleaze.

Remember that ballet school? The place where Laura is supposed to get her daughter? Well, all the kids drank the water and little Tommy has already killed his teacher with a hatchet and is asking who wants to play his favorite game with him called Playing Dead.

If you’ve made it through these thousand words and said, “This sounds more like a mondo than a narrative movie,” you’re right. It’s a collection of moments set to knock your brain out of your skull. This is also a disaster movie that spends all of a minute setting up the human drama and then deciding that none of those issues need resolution and instead, know that we came here to watch people get torn to bloody pieces. It delivers.

It’s also a movie that remembers how wild it gets when Dickie attacks Emily at the end of The Beyond and gives us a scene where a dog bites the hand that feeds of its blind owner while he’s trying to listen to classical music.

I love that after building the tension for an entire movie, it ends with type on the screen saying that everything is alright. Or is it?

Also this movie is the worst — or best, honestly — of exploitation because it has this message about animals and why they’re important and then it destroys them. Some folks claim this has a disclaimer that no animals were injured in the making of this movie, but we all know that that is outright bullshit. I mean, Prosperi and Jacopetti may have flown a time travel helicopter to share a message about America’s slavery past — but really Goodbye Uncle Tom was shot using the real slaves of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.

It’s hard to give a trigger warning when this whole movie is a giant gun pointing directly at your face.