Narrated in its English version by George Sanders at his most Addison DeWitt-ish - he also walked viewers through the English edition of the first picture in the series (World by Night) - Ecco, he tells us, means "Look, Witness, Observe, and Behold." What there is to behold in this globe-trotting documentary isn't much. A Parisian contest for the "most beautiful butt," a Black Mass performed at a remote mansion just outside London, French lesbians, etc. Some of the material is visually striking, such as a very Moby Dick-esque look at Portuguese whale hunters and what's billed (possibly erroneously) as "the Ritual of Saidachi," in which hundreds of half-naked Japanese men cram themselves into a Buddhist temple, generating so much friction the temple priests have to water the men down lest they burn up like an overheated Toyopet. One highlight certainly, if only for historical purposes, is what Sanders calls the "final performance of the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris," which on film makes an interesting bridge between 19th century theatrics and the crude shocks of Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose visually similar Blood Feast debuted the following year. No doubt the picture's squirmiest moments come watching happy Laplander women merrily castrate reindeer - with their teeth!

Unfortunately, Ecco (or, as George Sanders pronounces it, "Eeeehhhh-co," trying to add a continental flavor) lacks Mondo Cane's subversive sense of irony. In that picture the filmmakers challenged viewers to question First World rituals alongside supposedly "barbaric" Third World ones in an engagingly matter-of-fact presentation. Sanders is merely condescending, such as in one scene where in a nursery full of babies listening to educational audio tapes, he extols them to "Be good, don't cry, love mommy and daddy, and do not sink other people's battleships without first declaring war."

Compared with The Forbidden, Ecco is at least semi-competent. Mondo Cane's composer, Riz Ortolani, provides the score and some of the 'scope photography is nice.

The Forbidden's origins are unclear. Smarmily narrated with an absurd attention to the most inane minutiae (such as the price of mixed drinks at one nightclub) over tiresomely repetitive stripper footage, the film looks as if it were assembled using footage from a much more professionally-made French adults-only film and that most of the scenes with nude women were inserted later. Although the American narrator tells us we're seeing dancers from the swankiest and most daring nightspots in Paris, Brussells, and elsewhere, the strippers are shown only in tight medium shots and close-ups; rarely are more than a few customers in the audience even glimpsed.

Some of the film is in color, but most of it is in black and white. "We take you now to Stockholm" the narrator says over scenes of Paris, while another sequence backstage at a "London" strip club (London being "the hub of the stripper world") incongruously has French signage on the walls. After 15 minutes you'll want to scan through this one.

Video & Audio

Both features are letterboxed, neither is 16:9 enhanced. Ecco was filmed in an obscure process billed as Panchororama (aka Panoramic and Panoramica), essentially Techniscope but credited thusly on a handful of Italian films not actually processed by Technicolor. Both it and The Forbidden look okay, even reformatted to widescreens TVs, but why not press that 16:9 button during the mastering process? Neither film is subtitled; the disc is Region 1-encoded.

Extra Features

The main supplement is a 32-minute documentary (possibly edited down from feature length) that's even worse though at times more authentic than The Forbidden. Entitled I Want More! (1970), if you do then this has it, with more shots of the Sunset Strip with pubic hair art and biker sex among the highlights. It's in black and white and seriously marred by SWV's intrusive watermark.

Also included are a couple of mondo trailers and there's a good selection of exploitation art running about four minutes is supplemented with entertaining vintage radio ads.

Parting Thoughts

If you're a fan of the Prosperi & Jacopetti films released as a big boxed set by Blue Underground back in 2003, Ecco and The Forbidden will give you a good sense of the flotsam and jetsam that followed in their wake and just how superior those films were compared to dreck like this. It's hard to rain on Something Weird's gleefully cheesy parade, but the films are of minimal interest at best.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.