Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi could have stopped with Mondo Cane, but no, they had more people to educate. And offend. Actually, mostly offend. This three-year in the making ode to the end of the colonial era in Africa is a barrage of brutality, set to the wondrous music of Riz Ortolani.

Some claimed that the scene that shows the execution of a Congolese Simba Rebel had been filmed expressly for the film, which led to Jacopetti’s arrest on charges of murder. The film was seized by police and editing for the movie had to stop. When Prosperi produced documents proving they had arrived at the scene just before the execution, he was freed.

The American version of the film — which is the one I saw — was edited and translated without Jacopetti, who claimed that this new version of his movie Africa Addio is a betrayal. That version is missing 45 minutes of political setup and exclusively features carnage and gore.

This film more than struck a nerve. While Prospero would say, “The public was not ready for this kind of truth,” and Jacopetti claimed that the movie “was not a justification of colonialism, but a condemnation for leaving the continent in a miserable condition,” the team’s follow-up Addio Zio Tom — while intended supposedly to be an answer to the charges of racism in this film — somehow is even more vile.

You can even see the entire film crew nearly killed while making this movie. They put their lives on the line to bring this to you. Whether you want it or are ready for it are decisions left up to you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Pasquale Prunas has only one other IMDB entry for a documentary about Mussolini called Blood on the Balcony. However, the writer, Gian Carlo Fusco, would work on several mondos like Realities Around the World and Naked World.

This movie was part of American-International TV’s “Real Life Adventures” syndicated TV package that was offered in 1966. It’s a mondo, but much tamer than any you will encounter. The highlight — other than men toiling in the sulfur mines and the night clubs of the time — is probably a trip to the Venice Film Festival, which looks as if it were shot as a home movie.

This is available as part of The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield blu ray release from Severin.

Get ready for sixty-six minutes of pure scum from 1966, presented by Lee Frost (who wrote Race with the Devil and directed A Climax of Blue Power, along with The Thing With Two Heads) and Bob Cresse (whose Olympic International Films also brought The Scavengers and Love Camp 7 to the not so silver screen).

AGFA, who got the print of this out to the world all over again, says that it is “packed with staged scenes of Swiss lesbians, L.A. rapists, Parisian tarts and Nazi strippers.”

There’s also a sexy karate school commercial that for some reason has a girl taking a shower, murder and lots of strip club footage because it was 1966 and that’s the kind of thing that wasn’t widely available yet.

There’s also a great jazz/surf rock soundtrack under the hyperbolic narration. This had to blow minds fifty years ago. Today, it’s all pretty tame. But hey — somebody had to break ground, right?

You can get this on a double blu ray — along with Ecco — from Severin.

Mondo Freudo is all about “a world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it,” as told by two absolute maniacs: the producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, with Cresse himself ranting as we try and make it through another swing through the world of mondo.

This movie is everything I want it to be and more. A pro wrestling hero? A Eurospy James Bond rip-off? Future technology that is now charmingly quaint? A red masked lucha libre-esque hero massacring dudes with a flamethrower while the main villain and his mistress tie said hero’s girl to a torture table on fire? You should watch this movie three times and then stare into the sun and burn your eyes out. That’s how great it is.

Nicola Nostro made a few of the Ten Gladiators movies, but nothing prepared me for the madcap mayhem that he’d unleash on me with this movie. I mean, this is a film where the good guys stab and shoot Superargo just to show us all that he can’t be hurt and that his blood instantly coagulates.

Spanish actor Gérard Tichy (he was in plenty of Spaghetti Westerns and The Corruption of Chris Miller) plays Diabolicus. Loredana Nusciak — Maria, the lover of Django — plays his mistress who, of course, screws him over and gets machinegunned for her troubles by Superargo’s lady.

Superargo is — of course — Ken Wood (Italian real name: Giovanni Cianfriglia). He was Steve Reeves’ body double and shows up in another Italian superhero movie, Sandokan the Great. I love that Superargo becomes a super spy because of depression — he’s too strong and he threw another wrestler named El Tigra from the ring, killing him. Now, he just stays inside until his woman goes to his old army buddy and gets Superargo some government work.

There’s a scene where Argoman does a bicycle thing-a-majig with his feet while they test his blood pressure and scientist dudes lose their minds. Scenes like this are exactly why I adore this movie.

This is a movie that invents gadgets that are totally preposterous: a two-way radio inside a gigantic player piano. A geiger counter that looks like a cocktail olive. And a feminine brooch that has a television inside it that totally clashes with Superargo’s entire wardrobe!

The greatest thing about this movie is that at the end, Superargo awkwardly stares at the screen, kind of smirking, while the credits play. It’s not paused — he’s just standing there — and you’re like, “Yeah. That Superargo is a pretty good dude.”

There aren’t enough stars in the galaxy to rate this one.

Remember Seven Golden Men? No? Well, this is obviously the sequel to that film, written and directed by the same man, Marco Vicario.

Philippe Leroy (Mother of Tears, Mannaja), Rossana Podesta (Hera from Cozzi’s Hercules), Maurice Poli (Rabid Dogs), Manuel Zarzo (Nightmare City), Gabriele Tinti (Lisa and the Devil) and Giampiero Albertini (The Case of the Bloody Iris) all show up.

This time, The Professor (Leroy) and his men are captured by U.S. agents as they try to rob a train. To keep out of prison, they must kidnap a Latin dictator, but there’s so much gold that gets in the way.

Fats-moving, lots of gadgets and wow, Podesta is the real selling point of the film, acting above it all and sexy even when menaced by poisonous spiders.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Maniacs like me love Stewart Granger for his role in The Wild Geese, but he was also a leading man until the mid 60’s, when he started making movies in Italy. This spy film — an Austrian/German/Italian mash-up — was directed by Manfred R. Kohler, who wrote Daughters of Darkness and Franco’s The Blood of Fu Manchu.

Three years after making this, Karin Dor would play Bond girl Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice. It’s also nice to see Klaus Kinski, Curd Jurgens (Karl Stromberg from The Spy Who Loved Me) and Molly Peters (the nurse who takes care of Bond in Thunderball) and Adolfo Celli, who between this, Danger: Diabolik, Thunderball and OK Connery is Eurospy royalty.

This movie has an exciting beginning, with an entire crew of a plane trying to murder Dor’s character, even parachuting out of the plane and leaving her without a flight crew. There’s brainwashing on a major scale, but the film doesn’t live up to that initial promise.

You can watch this on YouTube:

What’s that you say? Another Sergio Grieco spy caper after his Agent 077 movies, The Tiffany Memorandum and Argoman the Fantastic Superman?

This time, Roger Browne (Super seven from Super Seven Calling Cairo) plays Doug Gordon and, of course, Helga Line is in this as the “not Bond” girl. Helga has been in more movies I’ve watched this spy month than just about anybody, with appearances in Kriminal, Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary, Special Mission Lady Chaplin and Avenger X.

You know who has been in just as many and is in this as well? Rosalba Neri, who was in Super Seven Calling Cairo, Two Mafiosi Against Godginger, OSS 117-Double Agent and The Spy with Ten Faces.

Points to this film getting ahead of the curve and being about sending weapons to the View Cong about five years before anyone was thinking of that. Otherwise, it’s an average film — except for, of course, Helga and Rosalba being in it.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube:

Italy and Spain combine to create this sequel to Super Seven Calling Cairo, written and directed by Umberto Lenzi using the name Hubert Humphry.

It brings back Roger Browne as Martin Stevens, Agent Super Seven. Emma Danieli from Spies Strike Silently, Daniele Vargas (Electra One from, well, Electra One), Marino Mase (Tenebre), Yoko Tani (The Secret of Dr. Mabuse), Sal Borgese (Super Fuzz), Tullio Altamura (A Black Veil for Lisa) and Attilio Dottesio (Death Smiles at a Murderer) all show up too.

Yoko Tani is honestly the only reason to watch this. Her life sounds pretty interesting by comparison, so let’s talk about that. Her Japanese parents worked at the Japanese embassy in Paris, with the actress conceived en route via ship and born in Paris, which is where she got her first name, which means “ocean child.”

After two years of time in France, her family moved back to Japan. She’d return in 1950 to attend a Catholic girls school for two years before she began dancing in cabarets, becoming famous for her sexy geisha dance. This got her the attention of director Marcel Carne, which is how she met her first husband Roland Lesaffre.

Between spy and sword and sandal films, she was in two films for Toho and is also in the Dean Martin movie Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? She continued dancing until late into the 1970s before remarrying to a wealthy French industrialist. Their shared grave has the phrase “Always together” on it.

As for Lenzi, he’d follow this movie with Kriminal and his last spy film Last Man to Kill. Along with a few war films, he’d begin making the giallo that so many in the U.S. know him for, like So Sweet…So Perverse, Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to Kill, Seven Blood Stained Orchids, Eyeball and Spasmo, as well as incredibly out there — and much beloved to me — films like Nightmare City, Ironmaster, Ghosthouse and Nightmare Beach.

You can watch this on YouTube:

Joseph Losey was blacklisted, which is no surprise, as he directed The Boy with the Green Hair. He took his career to Europe, where he made movies like Boom! and Don Giovanni.

This film is based on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell, who co-wrote the original story. There was a major battle between Losey and O’Donnell on this film, with the director wanting to create a pop art Eurospy spoof while the comic is serious. The avant garde-inspired editing and production design, musical numbers and deliberate continuity errors drove O’Donnell insane. He hated that Willie and Modesty had any romance at all.

Losey also had problems with leading lady Monica Vitti, as she would be joined on the set by director Michelangelo Antonioni, who would whisper suggestions to her, and she would take direction from him rather than the actual director of the film.

Ever notice how many spy movies start with another spy getting killed to set the events in motion? This is no different, with British Secret Service chief Sir Gerald Tarrant recruiting former criminal mastermind Modesty Blaise to protect a shipment of diamonds after their agent is offed.

Terence Stamp is in this as Willie Garvin, Modesty’s loyal sidekick and Dirk Bogarde is Gabriel, the criminal mastermind who is, for some reason, sensitive to violence.

Originally, Barbara Steele was going to play Modesty with Michael Caine as Willie. In a strange twist, Caine would ultimately star in Alfie, a role intended for his friend and former roommate Stamp.

I bought this for $3 at a Dollar General this year after wanting a copy for a long time. Inside it, there was a coupon for buying three Eurospy films — Fathom or the two Flint movies — and getting one free. I was really excited until I realized that the offer ended 17 years ago. That’s what you get for still buying DVDs.