Although it’s anyone’s guess why this bizarre simian-themed 1930 exploitation film was ever considered for re-release on a modern format, it offers, if nothing else, proof that there was such a thing as mockumentary long before Spinal Tap. And lore has it that this film—which masquerades as an ethnographic record of a tribe of African women who worship gorillas—was financially successful enough to make King Kong feasible in 1933. The proto-mock-doc features the fictional Sir Hubert Winstead of the Royal Geological Society as a host and guide through the jungles of the Congo, where contemporary moviegoers would have been confronted with their fair share of naked female bodies and even not-so-subtle suggestions of sexual congress between simian and Homo sapien. Along the way, Winstead and his sidekick Swayne poach a rhino, kill a huge python, and even discover a “new” creature called a tortadillo (a turtle with glued-on wings, no less).
The soundtrack to all this fake jungle hokum is limited to sparse organ lines that are as monotonous as the faux-sophisticated voiceover narration. There’s no attempt at any visual continuity throughout, in the sense that you have scenes one minute showing Winstead and Swayne, and then you might have an abrupt cut to actual documentary footage of the African jungle showing real explorers that are supposed to be Winstead and Swayne (never mind that the actors are dressed completely differently than the men in the documentary footage). But all of Ingagi’s low-budget tastelessness and assorted absurdities, incongruities, and shameless falsehoods couldn’t prevent the film from becoming one of the most profitable exploitation films in history, even more so than the lurid drugsploitation films of Dwain Esper that would have been providing edgy titillation to American filmgoers around the same time. But it’s still unclear what the crude and lewd Ingagi has to offer modern audiences in its new Blu-ray incarnation, except for the chance for us moderns to mock its technical ineptitude and abhor its vile early 20th-century racial attitudes. Not Recommended.