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Turtles in Movies
 
Mondo Cane (1962) (aka Tales of the Bizarre: Rites, Rituals and Superstitions)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
Mondo Cane Mondo Cane Mondo Cane
Mondo Cane Mondo Cane Mondo Cane
Mondo Cane might just be the first "shockumentary" film. Made by Italian filmmakers using real and staged events, it shows eccentric cultures around the world with their bizarre rites and practices, cruel behavior. The film uses all sorts of exploitation of sex and violence, and shows plenty of violence against animals. The film consists of a wide variety of random and unconnected lurid vignettes that include gangs of grass skirt wearing topless women of the Trobriand Islands who chase men and drag them into the bushes for sex, a villiage in New Guinea that kills and eats their pigs every five years, a pet cemetary in Pasadena, a restaurant in Taipei that cooks dogs that the customers pick out from cages, geese tortured to make fois gras, women in the Bismark Archipeligo who are locked in cages and fattened up until they reach 200 pounds so they can be wives of the skinny village dictator, automobile graveyards where cars are smashed into metal cubes, a cargo cult in Australia that worships airplanes, underwater human graveyards where the corpses attract sharks that maim the local fishermen who in turn catch and torture sharks, teenage girl lifeguards on a beach in Australia, nude women covered with bright blue paint throwing themselves at a canvas to make modern art, and lots more, including this sad and tragic section about sea turtles.

At an archipeligo in the Pacific Ocean that was poisoned after 23 muclear devices were exploded between 1946 and 1958 at nearby Bikini atoll, nature was so drastically altered that, according to the narrator, fish moved out of the water and took to the trees, some birds moved underground and other birds laid sterile eggs that never hatch.

The atomic contamination also destroyed the sense of direction of sea turtles that nest on the beaches there. First we see a sea turtle laying eggs on a beach at night, then we see a turtle in the sun walking away from the ocean to which she should be going. She moves inland past the carcases of other turtles to an area where birds are nesting on the ground. We are told that eventually the sun and fatigue will kill her. We see a turtle moving her legs as if she is swimming, just before she dies. Finally we see a turtle upside down and several turtle carcasses.

This was all obviously staged with shots of different turtles and the crew probably turned over a dead turtle to make it look dead, but it is obvious that some sea turtles there really were disoriented and dying as the narrator describes.