Ecco retains many of the production qualities of the previous year's Mondo Cane, including a dramatic music score from Riz Ortolani. Relatively classy English narration by actor George Sanders helped to earn Ecco a wide American release. Sanders' bemused voice lends credibility to the film's stated aim of showing us the extremes of behavior that make up the human race. The Italian word ecco means "look here," or "behold."

Filmed in color and widescreen, Ecco features a couple of intriguing subjects among a long list of phony, staged events. In Japan, a ritual festival called Saidachi involves hundreds of loin-clothed men rushing from freezing water to jam into an open-air pagoda and struggle for possession of a piece of paper. The crush of men is truly eye opening. Ecco's complete lack of contextual information undercuts any understanding of what we're seeing. Are the Japanese men college students, and is Saidachi the equivalent of a fraternity rite?

A demonstration in Lapland of a traditionally garbed maiden castrating an adult reindeer with her teeth is equally baffling. We don't know if the reindeer ritual is still being done this way or if we're seeing some wild stunt; the rest of the Lapp footage shows several photogenic couples pairing off in staged make-out sessions amid the beautiful northern scenery. The savagery of the castration ritual fires their passions, we're told.

The English narration written by the notorious exploitation producer Bob Cresse simply lines up prejudiced and racist statements for Sanders to read in his bored tones. The Lapps are sex-obsessed Scandinavians and the Japanese segment can't be finished without a reference to treachery at Pearl Harbor. Another segment showing the activities of a German dueling society assures us that the young fencers are overjoyed to be given disfiguring facial scars and then wrongly equates the Prussian dueling tradition with Nazi tendencies. A staged dirty party game in a 'private club' shows some inebriated Frenchmen (including actor Michel Simon) voting on a procession of nude derrières. The Frenchmen are decadent, and housewives gawking at an exhibition of musclemen are sexually frustrated ... the list of generalized insults goes on.

The notion that the Mondo movies are the cinematic equivalent of a carny sideshow is borne out by a sequence featuring a 'psychic wizard' who proves to be a geek-like professional body piercer. A karate exhibition was surely more exotic in 1963 than it is now. The "last performance" of the Parisian Theater of the Grand Guignol offers only a glimpse of action on the stage, but does show the theater's famous interior with its carved wooden angels.

Director Gianni Proia ends his show with a phony contrast of the sacred and the profane. A patently faked English Black Mass ends with a shower of chicken blood splattered onto a reclining nude, dramatically lit for the camera. Then we're shown an unconvincingly staged sequence of a devout Italian bride climbing a long stone church stairway on her knees. The ritual is said to have the power to enhance fertility, but the visuals make for a limp conclusion. It takes Riz Ortolani's rising music and George Sanders' patronizing narration to let us know that the movie has ended.

Ecco is presented in a reasonably good flat-letterboxed transfer of a surviving color print. Colors are variable. The audio quality is also acceptable. The only language is the English dub.