The sequel to the original suffers in some way from being a repeat of the first film – the initial shock and inspiration is gone, and there's a slight feeling of "more of the same". But the "more" we are served up is so rich and viscerally powerful that it would be churlish not to be grateful that we have been given more, by the two directors who do this kind of thing better than any others.

The film is another total immersion in the idea that our Enlightenment ideals of classification and separation – of "civilised" and "primitive" or of "human" and "animal" are not based in as strong a soil as we might think. Jacopetti and Prosperi see foolishness and cruelty everywhere, it isn't the prerogative of one way of life but part and parcel of the human condition, a condition which is a part of not apart from nature. We whiz from one continent to the next, seeing society women raising money for milliners in New York then fakirs suffering agonies to free themselves from pain in India, and its all just the parade going by. Mondo Cane 2 feels like a compilation of "the best ways people have found to fill in the void of existence" and by best they mean not morally best but most unique, eye-popping and curious. My own favourite sequence is the last, in which a pianist and accompanies a man who slaps a row of other men round the chops as a composition in a posh concert hall -here the filmmakers are quite literally giving a slap in the face to culture.

The most influential sequence in the film, and the one which really does raise the ante on the first Mondo Cane, is the self-conflagrating suicide of the Vietnamese monk. Now, we know pretty much now that the footage is faked (we can see the cut whereby they replace the real human being with a dummy) but that is hardly the point; the innovation was that people wanted to see something which looked like the reality of death on their cinema screens – a notion which has had profound influence on future documentaries, horror films and reality TV. Speaking of the latter, the late sequence which shows hopeless auditioners striving to become movie stars looks forwards to the TV talent contests which by the mid 2000s had become the biggest form of mainstream entertainment on TV in the western world. For better or worse, Jacopetti and Prosperi invented the media world we live in now, but unlike most of the people who came after them, they also possessed the most extraordinary talent for editing and cinematographic composition.

As far as compendiums of death, derangement, cruelty, faked reality, cynicism and ecological carnage go, Mondo Cane 2 is second to only its predecessor. If it feels familiar, it's because these guys are merely doing again what they did first; they went on to new things with Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom, and left a blueprint which countless others have followed, but no one has really done nearly so well.

MONDO CANE was an educational documentary featuring shocking scenes of human life and animal life. MONDO CANE 2 is just as educational and interesting, unlike the many imitators that erupted on video (i.e, FACES OF DEATH, etc.).

I can't really write a full-fledged review of the film, as it is just sequence after sequence. It's all interesting and you really learn things from the way it's presented. Some of my favorite scenes: the Parisian transvestite bar; a daring Mexican police shooting range; the Mexican Festival of the Dead (with skulls filled with cream, marzipan corpses, and live parasite tortillas); bugs turned into jewelry; Hawaiian tourists bathing in radioactive mud to freshen their skin; numerous religious fanatical acts in Italy and Portugal; rituals of pain in India; modeling sessions for gory pulp fiction book covers; smuggled footage of illegal slave trading in Africa; Sudanese tribes collecting dewdrops from plants because of a limited water supply; dancers wearing toilet paper being squirted with seltzer water; the Festival of Hard Heads in Italy (must be seen to be believed!); the artist Achille's paint-spitting party; a musical symphony enacted by slapping faces; Asian monks committing self-immolation; a heartbreaking sequence of pollution causing baby flamingos to mutate and die; and an African tribe becomes sterile because of their crocodile meat diet.

Amazing stuff throughout and never too boring, MONDO CANE 2 is lots of fun and will please those looking for something odd, intelligent, and something you can learn from.

Mondo Cane 2, is a second film in the popular Mondo Cane documentary series. The film is Italian although it is dubbed into English. Like, Mondo Cane this film doesn't just focus on one subject for it's documentary but several rather. Such scenes include Mexican children eating candy in the shape of body parts, a Buddhist who sets himself on fire and a concert where man are slapped to the tune of the music being played. I enjoyed Mondo Cane 2, just like I enjoyed the original Mondo Cane. It is beautifully filmed and all of the scenes right until the very end are fascinating and intriguing. The narrator also gives us some neat facts and during the movie you will once again wonder how some of this footage was filmed. The directors behind Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2, would later go on to do more films in the series including Africa: Blood And Guts and Goodbye Uncle Tom. Mondo Cane 2 is another entertaining and fascinating film and I look forward to seeing other films in this very intriguing and entertaining series.