Widely despised in their day and little remembered now, “mondo” films have a peculiar legacy. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, these so-called documentaries collected together shocking documents of sex, death and violence from around the world. Today they can seem almost quaint, but at a time when even Abraham Zapruder’s infamous home video of JFK’s assassination was little seen, they engendered plenty of intrigue – and outrage.
The British Board Of Film Censors took a dim view of the genre, initially banning and later censoring its first entry, 1962’s Mondo Cane. The notorious 1978 compilation Faces Of Death (warning, contains grim footage), meanwhile, wound up on the British government’s infamous list of prohibited “video nasties”. Even the genre’s most (grudgingly) critically respected work, 1982’s The Killing Of America, wasn’t submitted to the board until two decades after its completion, making this week’s release of a restored version on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD a rare opportunity to see the film in all its disquieting glory.
Taking as its central thesis the idea that the United States has an irrepressible systemic tendency towards violence, the film (and its almost laughably stern voiceover) offers a whistle-stop tour of more or less every terrible thing that happened in the country throughout the 60s and 70s. Cinematic agit-prop at its most overt, The Killing Of America surveys assassinations, spree killings and death cults in a sustained attempt to bludgeon its audience over the head with the US’s sheer ugliness.
That so many of the film’s grisliest sights are now available to view online may dampen its impact, but it also strengthens The Killing Of America’s argument that grotesque violence has become so culturally routine as to be almost unremarkable. Most haunting are the spectacularly gruesome events that time has still somehow managed to forget. One genuinely unbelievable sequence tells the obscure story of Tony Kiritsis, an Indiana man who, in 1977, attached a sawed-off shotgun to the head of his mortgage broker and then held a press conference.
The US murder rate has thankfully halved since 1982, but many of the social blights the film identifies remain pressing concerns in the United States today, from school shootings to unlicensed firearms. Now that even The Killing Of America’s most searing images pale in comparison to those available on a litany of shock sites, a film once known for its sensationalism comes off as surprisingly level-headed.
