Mandinga

Mandinga (1976)

The movie starts with a slave master purchasing a woman, who also happens to be a princess of the Mandinga tribe. After raping her she becomes pregnant and then dies in childbirth. Now this is a little confusing because the movie makes no effort to show that any time has passed, which gets even worse later on. The other slaves take the now motherless child away so that the master and his new mistress won’t kill it. Years later (which again is hard to tell because no one has aged!) the master’s son returns from school, is seduced by his father’s mistress, and then falls madly in love with a preacher’s daughter. After the son has more sex with his father’s mistress and some slaves he then marries his “true” love. The blushing bride gets pregnant and has a black baby! So of course now he has to kill her because she sullied herself with an animal. After shooting and killing her he then finds out that she in fact didn’t cheat on him and that she was unknowingly half black herself. That is because she was the offspring of the husband’s father and his slave, making her his half sister.

Okay this movie might sound good, but it really isn’t. The story is hard to follow because of the unacknowledged jumps in time. Since no one ages it takes a while to understand that 17 or 18 years have passed between events. But even without this confusion the story is still paper-thin and makes little to no sense. Basically this movie exists to present on soft-core sex scene after another. Maybe I’m spoiled by years of Skinemax and internet porn but I found the whole thing to be terribly boring and a chore to get thru. To be perfectly honest if I hadn’t been reviewing this movie I would have turned it off about a half hour into it. But I soldiered on so that I could provide an insightful and useful review for all of you loyal readers. So now is when I talk about the cast and their performances. It is really hard to judge the performances here because of the terrible dubbing in the movie (very distracting). If I were to make one observation I would have to say that the cast was chosen for their roles primarily because they looked good naked. Given how often that happens I can see why that was important.

Technically this movie is about as good as I would expect from a cheapie Italian flick that was made to cash in on the success of another movie’s popularity. The picture is decent, the production values very low, and again the dubbing is just awful. This seems to have been one of those movies made by someone that knew how to handle a camera, but not tell a decent story. I’ve seen worse, but not by much.

The biggest flaw this movie has is that most of it is mind numbingly boring. Unless you are really into soft-core sex scenes, and I mean really into them, then this movie isn’t going to do anything for you. I can’t really recommend it. But if you must watch this then you can find it on the Grindhouse Experience box set volume 1. I picked mine up at Best Buy, but most major retailers should have it.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer