Beware the Dog

Mondo Cane is Italian for "a dog's world." and this film is anything but man's best friend. The movie draws its scenes, documentary style, from every available source of contemporary bestiality and human foible, and comments on them by shocking juxtaposition. It is filmed in all-too-living color. Fast pace, sophisticated commentary and occasional hilarity mitigate its lack of taste, but most of the film is openly calculated to raise eyebrows as well as gorges. If there is a message, it is that people are no damn good. A sampling:

P: After ogling a beachful of bikinied bosoms, the camera cuts abruptly to a woman in New Guinea nonchalantly nursing a small, bristly pig, cuts again to a nearby village, where screaming hogs are being clubbed to death by natives in preparation for a barbecue.

P: At Pasadena's pet cemetery, mourning "mothers" sob as tiny coffins are lowered, a fat man in a sports shirt crosses himself over a grave, and a French poodle comments succinctly on the scene by relieving himself on a headstone marked "Judy Baby--our darling girl."

P: Gagging geese in Strasbourg are force fed by husky women who stuff funnels down their gullets, the better to make foie gras. A herd of hefty women on the Bismarck Archipelago bolt down endless helpings of tapioca, the better to make fat wives for the scrawny chieftain.

P: An underwater graveyard off the Malay coast is a litter of bones, picked clean by the sharks that come there to feed. The natives take advantage of the fact by catching the sharks and selling their fins to rich Chinese, who prize fins as aphrodisiacs. But the shark fishermen pay a price for their enterprise: scrabbling over the beach to tend the drying fins, each shows the stump of a leg, a maimed hand, the nub of an elbow.

P: A restaurant in Formosa follows the practice of many a good American seafood house: the patron is invited to select his dinner before it is cooked. There are cages of boxers and dachshunds and mongrel pups to choose from, but chow is considered the best.

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