Many mondo films are made in a way to resemble a pseudo-documentary and usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, or situations.
Common traits of mondo films include portrayals of foreign cultures (which have drawn accusations of ethnocentrism or racism),[1] an emphasis on taboo subjects such as death and sex, and staged sequences presented as genuine documentary footage.
Over time, the films have placed increasing emphasis on footage of the dead and dying (both real and fake).
Although earlier films such as Alessandro Blasetti's Europa di notte [it] (Europe by Night or European Nights, 1959) and Luigi Vanzi's [it] Il mondo di notte [it] (World by Night, 1960) may be considered examples of the genre,[3] the origins of the mondo documentary are generally traced to the 1962 Italian film Mondo Cane (A Dog's World—a mild Italian profanity) by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi which was a commercial success.
Later in the decade, this naming convention began to fall out of favour and fewer mondo films identified themselves as such in their titles.
Russ Meyer's film Mondo Topless was one of the few "documentaries" restricted to the old midnight movie circuit in the pre-VCR era; it explored strip clubs in 1960s San Francisco, at a time when strip clubs were a novelty in the United States, restricted to centers of port-city decadence (such as San Francisco).
The 1980s saw a resurgence of mondo movies focusing almost exclusively on (onscreen) death, instead of world cultures.
Mondo Beyondo spoofed the films' approach to titling, but was a parody of satellite television.
In 1969, brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni began to make a series of their own mondo films until the early 1980s.
[12] In 1993, Hurricane Pictures edited a mix of scenes featured in Addio ultimo uomo and Shocking Africa, labeling it the "fifth chapter" of the saga (Teil V in German).