By Paul McVay, It Came From Hollywood
A glorious press book for a garbage flick. At least, that is my assumption, as I’ve never seen the picture and I’m not a huge fan of Shock-Doc’s (says the guy who created the cover art for Faces of Death director John Alan Schwartz’s 2014 memoir titled My Faces of Death.) Now that my full disclosure is finished, let’s move on.
Taboos of the World is a 1963 Italian-made documentary that AIP picked up sometime in 1964. On page two of this pressbook (upper left corner), you will see a copyright notice that reads 1964. The film wouldn’t be released until the Fall of 1965. Another one of those AIP headscratchers that we will probably never figure out.
For a Shock-Doc, it is apparently tame. According to Robert L. Ottoson’s 1984 tome American International Pictures: A Filmography, Taboos of the World contains “a mass for lepers; a funeral in the Ganges; atom bomb victims; addicts selling their children to support their habit; Scandinavian blood drinkers; tattooed women; and a Japanese sect who cut off their little fingers as part of an initiation ceremony.” My feeling about Ottoson’s description is that it probably came about as a result of watching the movie on VHS in preparation for his book, rather than him sitting in a theater surrounded by guys in trench coats at 11 pm on a Wednesday night in 1965. More on that VHS release in a bit.
All the “taboos” described by Ottoson can currently be viewed on your local television news seven days a week, but in 1965, the film caused a bit of a stir. Even so, such was the mania for movies like this after the colossal success of Mondo Cane in 1962, that the public slunk into drive-in theaters and questionable hard tops to catch a glimpse of the world’s gutters. With the mondo amount of moolah Mondo Cane raked in, there was no way in hell Arkoff & Nicholson were going to be left out.
To lend a little “arty” narration weight to AIP’s release of Taboos, they employed the vocal talents of the Merchant of Menace himself, Vincent Price. This is interesting because of the dozens of “reviews” of this movie available on the internet, none of these scribes saw the version of the film with Price’s voice. Most of them, I’d venture to guess, have never watched it at all but simply have been regurgitating Ottoson’s description via his AIP filmography. Price’s voice, along with AIP’s cut of the film, disappeared into the quagmire of time after its theatrical release.
Taboos of the World did so well that AIP imported a sequel in 1966 and titled it Macabro. Fantastic title, but filled with the same sorrows of the world as its predecessor. Macabro suffered an even greater injustice as the film vanished from the face of the Earth. There are no surviving prints. It simply ceased to exist after its theatrical run and has not reared its ugly head in the sixty years since.
Despite AIP burying Taboos of the World at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the Italian cut did surface in the early 1980’s and received a VHS release. Because the print containing the narration by Vincent Price was the now-disappeared AIP U.S. cut, the video’s distributors hired a poor man’s version of Price’s voice. Apparently, they assumed any British voice actor would suffice to replace Price, save for the fact that Price wasn’t British. This version of the film is the one anyone who has watched it in the last sixty years has seen it and they have all watched the same shitty VHS copy of it.
Garbage is garbage any way you burn it, and although it saddens me to think two films that helped define the mondo genre in the ‘60s will never be seen again, we know they existed because we have a multitude of movie marketing to prove that they did. In the case of Taboos of the World and its twisted sister Macabro, it appears that what has survived of these films is far better than the actual content they advertised.
ZC Nostalgia Note: Unlike Paul, I did see the movie, along with Mondo Cane, when it played in Brooklyn theaters (probably at the Loew’s Oriental on 86th Street). I was nine years old. While Mondo Cane left me sleepless for a few nights, Taboos was less startling. But still, at that age, I was kind of shocked and mesmerized too. What’s tame today was mind-blowing stuff back then for a kid (and most adults too). While my parents had split up early on, my dad would take me to the science fiction and documentary type movies on weekends when he was around. With him, I did get to see a lot of R-rated movies. My mom was horror, through and through, and any day was a good one to see a horror movie with her.