No Good Very Bad Movies 2: The one that was unmovied by everybody

 

Title: Ingagi

What Year?: 1930

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In considering the possibilities for this feature, what I kept running into is a fundamental weakness of the “worst” movie list: For any given place and time, the most incompetent and worthless art end up either forgotten, failed or simply destroyed with the passage of time. With this in mind, I knew if I did go down this road, I would have to do something with “lost” films, already the subject of my extensive unwritten “unmovie” file (see… Fantastic Four?). Inevitably, I already had one particular film at the very top of my list, one I had even mentioned (and misspelled) in the course of an earlier review. It happens to be not just a possible lost movie, but a box office smash, a notorious hoax, and one of the most actively censored and suppressed films in U.S. history. Here is Ingagi, a film that tried to pass off porn as anthropology using other people’s footage, and possibly inspired King Kong in the bargain.

Our story begins with a text crawl introducing a very important and certainly not completely made-up expedition to the darkest parts of unexplored Africa, apparently narrated by the most irritatingly banal voice money could buy. What follows is an hour of grainy African tribal rituals, wildlife footage that’s actually interesting, suspiciously pristine shots of the expedition in camp and animals that don’t live in Africa, and several supposedly dramatic animal attacks that are clearly staged since none of the lions try to kill the narrator. It all builds up to the final 20 minutes, in which we see pygmies, unclothed native women, a strange hairy child, and finally, a woman offered to a gorilla as either a sacrifice or a bride!

Ingagi was a 1930 exploitation/ erotic film released by a studio identified as Congo Pictures, and presented as a documentary of an expedition in which at least one crew member had been killed. In fact, the vast majority of the film’s footage was taken without permission from earlier sources, particularly an otherwise lost 1915 film titled Heart of Africa. Investigations showed that sequences purporting to show interbreeding between African natives and apes were created with a suited actor identified as Charles Gemora and local African-American women hired to appear nude as “half-human” natives. Its controversial claims and content led to investigations and condemnation by the FTC, the Better Business Bureau and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later the MPA), but apparently not from the NAACP or other civil rights organizations. The film was ultimately suppressed, in part by further copyright infringement litigation, after grossing an estimated unadjusted $4 million box office from at least 7 and possibly more than 10 million tickets sold. Further rumors held that it influenced RKO’s decision to make King Kong. It was long considered “lost” or at least inaccessible, though prints were known or reported to exist in the Library of Congress and elsewhere. A Blu Ray of the complete film was released by Kino Lorber in January 2021.

I can’t say when I first heard of this movie, though it was definitely in connection with Kong. What has kept me vaguely fascinated is how obviously false its premises were. The perception of apes as potential man-eaters and symbols of primal savagery was suspect enough; from what we know now, the chimp is omnivorous enough to give substance to certain dark tales, but then, they are the one ape most like us. The notion or even suggestion that humans and apes might interbreed was ridiculous at face value. Even an illiterate farmer would presumably know that a horse and a donkey can only produce a sterile mule, and the equines are more like each other than a chimp is to a human. (And, as scientists are fond of pointing out, a shaved chimp would look lily-white…) Yet, I can think of dead-serious speculation on the subject into the 1970s at least. It was enough to keep me monitoring the usual channels for any sign that this film might become available. When I finally found it online for free, I was ready to go, and if there’s one thing I can say without hesitation, it’s that I got my money’s worth.

At this point, I am once again straining for words. This movie is easily among the top 5 or 10 worst things I have ever watched, and the one thing I can think of off the top of my head that I might put on an equal footing is the Battletoads TV pilot. The difference, of course, is that entries of that ilk can be put away in twenty-some minutes, whereas this is close to an hour and a half, and it was shown and publicly advertised in the USA. I can easily believe that this is the worst English-language feature film to survive at all, and making the usual adjustments for context actually makes it more appalling. Again, this wasn’t a foreign TV show or an indie porno flying under the radar, but a top-earning film. Watching this movie with its history in mind is like wandering into an alternate universe where Inseminoid is getting a franchise reboot.

And of course, that still isn’t talking about the movie. I can laugh as I’m writing this, but I cannot say emphatically enough, there is absolutely no fun factor in watching the actual film. It’s like the Midas touch in reverse, taking elements that should be tolerable if not entertaining and turning them into a grueling ordeal that feels like a time dilation. The narration is the obvious spearhead of the assault on the senses and sanity, spouting off pretentious hype and eventually preposterous lies without any trace of the energetic, nudging hokum that a PT Barnum or a real-life Carl Denham could have brought to the affair. But the choice of footage can’t be underestimated, either. There’s a little entertainment value in picking out the benign errors and fabrications, like alligators mixed in with the crocs, the bestial orangutans and “flesh-eating” armadillos that aren’t even from Africa, and the preposterously unthreatening “tortadillo”. But then there’s the insulting finale, an entire hour in, where you can barely make out anything except that the gorilla somehow looks smaller than the human actors. In many ways, however, the most distasteful of many moments are the tribal rituals. It all feels undignified as well as suspect, and the offense is greatly magnified by the narrator.

That leaves me with “one scene”, and I definitely had one in mind. A little over 20 minutes into this “Heart of Darkness” slog, we have the first of far too many festive scenes of tribal life, in this case women preparing food with something like butter churns. What makes it moderately interesting is that there are children wandering around. Strikingly, the ones who aren’t otherwise occupied very consistently look directly at the camera. It’s enough for the enlightened and introspective viewer to ponder just how alien westerners with camera equipment would have been to tribal people, and just how discomforting it would have been to go through the motions of their lives in front of the travelers’ machine. Then, just in case you were wondering if this was somehow seeping through to the people behind the film, one of the woman bends over, and the narrator sees fit to remark that the natives are “quite shapely”, as if this was in itself a remarkable discovery. (There’s another point where a similar “compliment” is bestowed on native men!) It perfectly distills the whole feel of the movie, smugly hinting that this is a progressively hip take on racial relations, when in reality,  it comes across like the auctioneer at a slave market.

In conclusion, I come as usual to the rating. Make no mistake, this movie is not just bad, but insulting, vile, and outright evil in its own small and ignorant way. Yet, to hold these things against it feels like blaming a dung beetle for eating dung. This kind of movie isn’t simply a product of its time, but the perfect and honest summation of it, and as such, it is the abyss that stares back at those who stare too long into it. It can be further said that it makes even the small steps of the era stand out as leaps forward, like the casting of Nobel Johnson as the witch doctor in King Kong, a reasonably dignified role for a fine actor and a real-life activist who had founded his own studio to give African-Americans better representation in Hollywood. In the verdict of history, the movie deserved to be lost, but the world still deserves to have it. With that, I for one am done with it.