Movie: Water Power

Aka: The Enema Bandit

Year: 1976

Type of film: A based on a true story hardcore porn filtered through the lenses of Taxi Driver and enema fetish.

The Pitch: Sexual weirdo Burt goes to a brothel in Manhattan where he witnesses an enema being administered. His life is changed and his new mission is to roam the streets of the city looking for dirty women who must be cleansed of their ‘vile humours.’

And the madness continues. Intercut with all of this is
modern footage, much of it seemingly stock. There’s a New Orleans jazz
funeral that’s probably a Mondo Cane outtake and that is overlaid with
almost completely non-related narration. There’s a scene from a rally
during comedian Dick Gregory’s run for president in 1968, and it
includes a bit of narration that I feel like sums up the filmmaker’s
race war feelings in a delightful nutshell: ‘What makes this candidate
for the White House exceptional is that his political program does not
include cutting the throats of all white Americans. Perhaps this is why
he wasn’t very successful.’ Amazing.

It’s hard to pick out one
scene in Addio Zio Tom that is the most offensive, but if pressed I may
go with the Fellini-esque sequence where a black dwarf huckster takes
the camera on a tour of a black whorehouse. By now we’re used to the
degredation of women in the film, so when Too Short’s great grandfather
tears their tops off, we’re not moved. But a scene where young boys are
painted silver by a grotesquely caricatured gay man goes beyond the
pale. The camera lingers on the painted penises of these kids and you
have to wonder who applied that paint. What was it like on set that
day? Can the FBI raid my house for owning this? In comparison to this
abject nastiness the next scene, a re-enactment of the story of a New
Orleans woman who sexually abused and murdered her slaves, comes across
as totally tame.

As Addio Zio Tom hits the two hour mark (!),
the whole thing feels like a bad fever dream. But the true delirium is
just about to happen. Jacopetti and Prosperi have spent 120 minutes
sending their mixed messages about race, but now they make their
ultimate statement – it’s again the modern day and a black man with an
Afro dressed like a minister is on a Miami beach, trying to read
William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. We see his mind’s eye
imaginings of the slave-in-revolt’s murders of white families, and he
imagines axe murdering the annoying white people on the beach around
him. The whole movie reaches a bizarre climax here, as the blood soaked killings are played in loving detail, including a baby being beaten to
death against a wall. There’s no judgment here – the filmmakers are
more or less siding with the idea that these honkies should be iced.
These Italians know how to make a movie, and these scenes are flat out
intoxicating. Watching Black Panther types take axes to white families
(with that Ortolani music on the soundtrack!) never felt so good.

The film’s final moment makes sure things go out on an insane bang. The
Styron-reading black radical sits in the sand and a young white boy’s
beach ball bounces to him. The black minister holds the ball in his
hands and stares at the boy, his grip tightening. The ball explodes and
he grins… and freeze frame and credits. It’s incredible!

As the credits roll you can’t help but be dazed. What the fuck did you
just watch? Was that a movie that hates black people and wants to do
nothing more than humiliate them, or was it a movie that wants to
incite a black revolution? I think it’s both – these filmmakers were
sleazy exploitationers, and they knew that they could appeal to the
urban black grindhouse patrons with the race war bullshit and the
southern white drive in people with the constant demeaning of blacks.
And both audiences were pretty interested in seeing rape, tits and
violence, so it was win/win all around. In many ways the schizophrenic
nature of Addio Zio Tom is its greatest triumph – it’s a movie that is
what you make of it. Of course it’s still a deeply evil piece of work,
whatever you make of it, but this is a film calculated to appeal to –
and deeply offend – audiences both white and black.

It will be hard to top Addio Zio Tom in the CHUDsploitation column for
the simple fact that it’s one of the few exploitation films that
retains just as much power today as it had when it was released (it
probably has even more, as the uncut version, with all the race war
stuff, was only recently available in America). Part of the movie’s
power comes from the quality of the filmmaking, which has kept it from
aging as badly as its slapdash grindhouse brethren, but much of it
comes from the sheer extreme aspects of Jacopetti and Prosperi’s
vision. I keep mentioning the fact that it took them three years to
make this movie because I am astounded at their commitment to this
sickness. Most exploitation films would be quickies, shot in a minimal
number of days and tossed onto the circuit as soon as possible so as to
begin making money right away. Three years qualifies any movie as a
passion project, and what does it say about the souls of men whose
passion project is a diseased piece of trash like Addio Zio Tom? The
best exploitation films carry the marks of the men who made them, their
kinks and quirks and obsessions. After this movie the duo would go on
to make one more movie together, the pornographic S&M epic Mondo
Candido, apparently a take on Candide (I’ve never had the opportunity
to see this film, so I’m just reporting what I’ve read); between the
dehumanizing cruelty of Addio Zio Tom and the graphic S&M scenes of
Mondo Candido, I think we can guess what Jacopetti and Prosperi’s
foibles and kinks were.

In Mondo Cane and Africa Addio, Jacopetti and Prosperi had tried to
expose the worst of humanity for our shock and pleasure. The amazing
thing about Addio Zio Tom is that when they ran out of real world ways
to do it, they began to just manufacture it themselves. This film is
among the most morally horrible things a human being has ever created,
a true landmark in the annals of depravity, a work that outshines de
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in terms of sickness if only because these
inhuman Italians used not just pen and paper to express their debased
fantasies but the very flesh of real people. I dare even the most
cynical person to watch Addio Zio Tom and not find new reasons to hate
humanity.

The Italian
version gets to the time travel (and the opening title) at the
sixteenth minute, but before that it takes a delightfully prescient
detour. An old white woman stands on the grounds of her family
plantation, burned a hundred years before in a slave uprising. Then she
gets in her car with her black driver and Jacopetti and Prosperi are
doing a riff on Driving Miss Daisy two decades before its release…
except that in this version the black driver is listening to inciting
activists on the car radio while the lady is shopping, and we see that
he has murder in his heart.

Up until now Addio Zio Tom has been
sort of strange, but it’s at the opening title where it takes off into
orbit. The camera crew, there to investigate slavery, meets a group of
landed whites having dinner while black children play under their table
and eat their scraps like dogs. The whites make fun of the ever-unseen
Italians for being papists, and they discuss their rationalizations for
the slave trade. Then we visit a slave ship as it makes its trip across
the ocean and the movie’s dark heart is finally and truly revealed.

There
are people who refer to the slave trade as the African Holocaust, and
in many ways the graphic scenes in Addio Zio Tom illustrate just how
apt that name is. The depravities visited upon the people who were
taken from their homes and crammed onto boats, sent across the ocean to
live their remaining days as chattel, remain the most hideous mark upon
American history. Putting that horror in the face of modern Americans,
making us feel it, is a valid cinematic way of keeping that history
alive and fresh. But as you watch a cast of poor Haitians, pitifully
paid by the Italian exploitationers, being humiliated and mistreated in
torture devices all too realistic, you begin to wonder when the line
between invoking reality and creating a new horror gets crossed. One
slave ship scene explains the process of corking slaves, filling their
assholes with tar and cork so that they wouldn’t leak so much when they
inevitably got dysentary; the scene includes a re-enactment of a
corking so real and graphic that I’m hard pressed to explain how this
was accomplished without having one man shoving an object up the ass of
another man.

Just as you’re reeling from the shock of the slave
ship scenes, Jacopetti and Prosperi do one of their delirious
personality shifts; all of a sudden we’re back in the modern day and
well dressed black people are going dancing at the Roseland Ballroom in
New York City while the narrator accuses them of being Uncle Toms and
sellouts. Pretty harsh criticism from a bunch of well-off Italians, I’d
say.

That trip to the present day is quick, and the film is soon
back in time, visiting a slave sorting center in Louisiana. It’s
actually Haiti, though, where the film was shot with the cooperation of
dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. The frame is filled with naked black
children; naked black men sit in suspended cages, being deloused by
fumes. And then the film’s next real life atrocity – naked black men
are hung upside down from their ankles. The narrator tells us that this
was the treatment for epileptics – truly a horrible historical note (if
true) – but the sight of poor Haitians being actually hung from their
ankles has to make your gut twist in horror. These scumbags are
exploiting black people to make a point about how bad it is to exploit
black people. Mind bending.

The slave sorting scene is one that
exemplifies another of the schizophrenic aspects of Addio Zio Tom –
this is one of the most beautiful ugly movies ever made. The
composition of wide screen vistas are often impeccable, and the colors
and camerawork are first rate. As the camera pans above the men hanging
upside down, looking at the soles of their feet and the bottom of their
balls, you have to admire the craftsmanship on display. Scenes of
runaway slaves being shot down in a swamp happen in an evocative,
poetic slow motion. Most exploitation films look as nasty as their
subject matter, but this film – which took three years to make! – is
lovingly crafted in every scene. That paradox is one of the things that
keeps drawing me back to this film, which I’ve now seen maybe eight or
nine times (which is really an awful lot, considering how utterly evil
it is).

The horrors continue unabated as the movie traces the
path of a slave from ship to master and beyond. A scene of slaves being
fed consists of hundreds of nude extras rushing slop troughs, among
them the deformed and retarded. A baby is placed in the trough, gruel
shoved in its mouth. Another scene has a first person view of a white
visitor to a plantation manor being offered a 13 year old slave for his
sexual pleasure; she begs him (and us, since the camera is his point of
view) to deflower her or the Mammy will beat her. The scene fades out
as they begin to fuck… all still from the camera’s point of view.
There’s almost not even an excuse needed to have the black extras
naked; the movie is one long parade of dicks and tits. A group of low
class whites – the original crackers, the film tells us – rapes their
way through a barn filled with black women, the camera lingering as the
non-actresses weep. Over it all the soundtrack finally plays a song that
isn’t the main theme – it’s a romantic number, sounding like it could
be called Love Theme From Addio Zio Tom. Insert shots of children
watching the rapes almost feels redundant. How much more sickened can
they possibly make me?

Speaking of children, one of the movie’s
most arresting images comes as a bunch of white kids frolic in green
fields, followed by an angelic little blonde girl… holding a little
black boy on a chain. In another context this is a heartbreaking moment
that defines the depravities of an era; in this film it’s just another
horrible low blow.

Addio Zio Tom is obsessed with the sexuality
of blacks. We visit a breeding farm, where a huge retarded ‘stud’ named
Casanova impregnates unwilling women. A grossly fat white man feels up
actually pregnant extras. A slave is deballed for fucking too many
virgins on the farm (the ripping off of his testicles happens
surprisingly offscreen, but his screams are on the soundtrack as a
rotten toothed German woman laughs). It’s Mandingo all over again (and
again and again) – the black man as sexual threat, seen in awe and
disgust at the same time. The black woman is nothing more than a sexual
device; in the scene where the 13 year old begs the camera to deflower
her she complains that black men’s dicks are too big for her and she
prefers whitey. Misogyny doesn’t even touch on it – the film is filled
with a dismissal of woman as actual beings that doesn’t even leave room
to see them as individual enough to hate.

Jacopetti and
Prosperi don’t just keep their hatred to blacks. They take lots of
shots at the Church, depicting the clergy as grotesque hypocrites. One
of the most over the top scenes in the movie is an interview with a
Jewish doctor who experiments on slaves and keeps them in almost
Auschwitz-like conditions. He doesn’t see them as human, doesn’t think
they have any feelings. Watching this Jew caricature, straight out of a
John Birch Society comic strip, walking among extras in medieval
restraint devices is weird enough, but in the next scene he’s laughing
and throwing food at a twitching, crawling mass of cripples and
amputees. Even the most jaded viewer is going to feel his skin crawling
here.

Continued on the next page!

Movie: Addio Zio Tom

Aka: Farewell Uncle Tom; Goodbye Uncle Tom

Year: 1971

Type of film: Blaxploitation meets Morality Movie with a helping of Roughie thrown in for good measure.

The Pitch: An Italian documentary crew goes back in time to the pre-Civil War American South to document the excesses and horrors of slavery, intercut with modern riot footage and pro-violence black power musings. In Italian.

Buy it!

Exploitation Elements:

The level of insanity onscreen in Addio Zio Tom may be unmatched in
movie history. And the film is almost as despicable as it is insane –
racist in every possible direction, brutally misogynistic and leeringly
cruel, the film is a masterwork of of unbridled sleaze.

The
men behind Addio Zio Tom were no strangers to sleaze; Gualtiero
Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi were the minds behind Mondo Cane, a
groundbreaking documentary that used footage of ‘bizarre’ cultural
practices and partially clothed women to shock and scandalize
audiences. Mondo Cane created a whole genre, known as Mondo films,
which found their theatrical apex in the Faces of Death movies, and
have since moved on to television where they have morphed in to reality
game shows and the like. Mondo Cane is a fascinating case study on its
own as it was nominated for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival
in 1962 and its theme song, More, was nominated for an Academy Award. The establishment wouldn’t long be fooled by these guys or their new genre, though.

Jacopetti
and Prosperi directed some more documentaries, including Mondo Cane 2,
which is probably mostly made up of the leftover footage from the
original. They really began to reach their sick stride with Africa
Addio, an extraordinarily violent documentary that is about the
collapse of Africa in the post-colonization world. It contains the
hallmarks of a Jacopetti and Prosperi production, which they would
perfect in Addio Zio Tom – luridly gory imagery (some real, some
claimed faked, some claimed real but staged for the cameras) in the
service of ‘education.’ American audiences saw only a trimmed down
version of Africa Addio, called Africa Blood and Guts, which took away
a lot of the political content from the film, rendering it even more of
an exploitation piece.

Addio Zio Tom was the second to last last
movie the two worked on together, and it almost seems like they had
gone as far as reality could take them and needed to find the next
step. The concept behind the movie is almost hallucinatory in its sheer
brilliance: an Italian documentary crew takes a helicopter ride back to
the pre-Civil War American South to make a Mondo movie about slavery.
Shot from 1968 to 1970, this conceit is sort of groundbreaking and the
directors use it very wisely. There’s no long winded explanations of
how or why these Italians have come to the past, they just arrive in a
helicopter that is greeted by dozens of rotor windswept plantation
kids. The film has interviews with people involved in the slave trade;
some are just fictional while others are credited to writing or
correspondence from the time period. Since Jacopetti and Prosperi were
happy to use faked footage of a monk setting himself on fire in Mondo
Cane, I’m not taking their sources at face value here. That said, the
way their interview subjects end their statements by stating the source
adds a surreal sheen to the proceedings.

The American version of
Addio Zio Tom – known either as Farewell Uncle Tom or Goodbye Uncle
Tom, depending on where or when you saw it – has been heavily edited
from the Italian original, removing much of the strange race war
aspects. The American version opens with the helicopter descending on
the plantation, while the Italian cut opens with modern day black men
harvesting cotton with huge machines. Over their radios they hear that
Martin Luther King Jr has been shot, and the film cuts to footage of
riots in major American cities with Riz Ortolani’s driving theme played
with aggressive fuzzed electric guitars. Ortolani was nominated for the
Oscar for his Mondo Cane song More, and he probably should get some
sort of major award for the Addio Zio Tom theme, which is played again
and again in a myriad of styles ranging from rock to ragtime and yet
never gets boring. If I had a band I’d cover the shit out of this theme
– it’s just plain awesome.

The riot footage is fascinating and
exciting with the music playing over, but on top of that is Italian
narration, reading excerpts from statements from black nationalists and
radicals. The movie early on takes the side of the truly violent
separatists, the folks who advocated violence during the most turbulent
days of the civil rights struggle. This is just the beginning of the
movie’s utterly schizophrenic politics – the modern day documentary
footage and a final weird fantasy sequence come squarely down on the
side of revolutionary black radicals and their right to murder the shit
out of whites, while the rest of the film is a bunch of white dweebs
from Italy exploiting the living shit out of poor black people to get
nudity and violence in their disgusting movie.

Continued on the next page!