One has to admire the guts and gusto of the gang behind Ingagi — or would admire if director William Campbell’s very idea and execution weren’t so, well, racist. It’s a historical curio nonetheless.

A color-tinted stew of ethnography and chicanery, the film purports to be a documentary of a 1926 African expedition by one Sir Hubert Winstead. In actuality, Ingagi not only was faked, but much of its safari footage stolen from another movie, which explains why those scenes are of much lesser resolution.

As the opening crawl of exposition informs audiences, Winstead has heard wild stories of a remote village in Africa whose tribesmen adhere to a most unusual yearly ritual: sacrificing a woman to a sex-mad gorilla, simply because they believe the gods demand it. The gods must be crazy! So Winstead and his fellow British explorers head to Africa to take some time to do the things they never had.

Upon arrival, they watch a beggar perform cigarette tricks and play three-card monte with eggs — all a mere prelude to the zoo-as-menu shenanigans on which the bulk of Ingagi is built, from warthogs to wildebeest. Animals encountered and/or hunted include crocodiles, zebras, elephants, leopards, deer, giraffes, ostriches, vultures, rhinos, armadillos, hyenas and fairly tame impala. Many, if not most, of these creatures are killed, with retrieval of the bodies left to Winstead’s native “boys.” Maybe it’s my chronic back pain, but dragging a dead hippo looks like quite the chore.

We also witness a python denied a lunch of lemur, as well as Winstead’s crew setting traps for little monkeys; when one is caught, narrator Louis Nizor chuckles with a tinge of cruelty, “What a duffer!” (Nizor, who fulfilled similar duties a year later for Campbell’s follow-up, Nu-Ma-Pu – Cannibalism, is highly opinionated throughout, remarking on “grotesque baboons” and outright declaring, “Rhinos are stupid beasts.”) For good measure, they “discover” a new animal they dub the “tortadillo,” which is a tortoise affixed with phony wings and tail, looking not unlike a Pokémon precursor.

Infamously, Ingagi’s climax depicts Winstead’s cameramen catching footage of that fabled gorilla nabbing a topless native woman for some interspecies hanky-panky. The big ape is played by none other than Charles Gemora, who donned such a suit in more than 50 movies, including The Gorilla and Island of Lost Souls. After more than an hour of buildup, the sequence is deflating to expectations — fitting for what amounts to a no-taste National Geographic special and forebearer of the mondo mockumentary. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Multiple reasons may exist for a carnival sideshow’s use of garish paintings and a curtain to curtail peeks from the ticketless, but I’m only interested in the most obvious: Because you don’t get what you pay for.

Legendary B-movie director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knows this; in fact, he literally wrote the book on it. Amplified by the barker’s ballyhoo, the sideshow posters outside the tent promised one thing and delivered another on the other side of the admission booth: something always lesser, often phony. For example, what was depicted as a giant spider with a human woman’s head actually would be — zut alors! — an illusion achieved by the lady sticking her head through a prop atop of a web of rope, with everything below her neck concealed.

Which brings us to Ray’s carnival-set Spidora. Its key art and tagline — hell, its very title — prime the viewer for a fanciful, “eight-legged love story” of this so-called spider woman. This is not that.

As much of a con as the shows it emulates, this is about Princess Marina, the Lobster Girl (the Amy Adams-esque Megan Sheehan), she of the claws for hands. Now, she does don a mask to moonlight as Spidora, which we get in one all-too-brief scene. But the rest? The rest is Marina and the smitten, Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Bobby Quinn Rice from Ray’s Super Shark) who’s a regular to the Museum of the Weird, Strange and the Unexpected. (Try fitting that on a ticket.)

Ray’s affection for the state-fair “freak show” is evident and reverent, given the sheer amount of coverage allotted to Marina’s act, the introductions of the top-hatted host (Jerry Lacey, TV’s Dark Shadows), the coat hanger swallower (Grindsploitation’s Krystal Pohaku) and the fire dancer (Crystal Marie) who twirls nary a tassel, but lighted wicks dangling from her pasties.

Less-exotic-sounding subject switcheroo notwithstanding, more to interested parties’ detriment is Spidora’s running time, misleadingly labeled at “Approx 90 Minutes.” That number is accurate if you include — and the Retromedia Entertainment DVD does — 1952’s notorious Chained for Life among the bonus features. Separated from that vehicle for conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, Spidora runs a pat 15 minutes, which is not enough time to achieve anything but a start. Ray may not have had the funding to expand the short into a full film, but he definitely had the story, however unexplored. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.