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.

The retro tribute Le Choc du Futur ends with an onscreen note of thanks to the unheralded women who were pioneers of electronic music in the 1970s, with a list of names that should be immediately written on a piece of paper and taken to your nearest record store to search.

Translated The Shock of the Future, the French film details a day in the life of Ana (Alejandro’s granddaughter Alma Jodorowsky) and her obsession with 70s-era equipment — especially a then-state-of-the-art beat machine — in the attempt to make a commercial jingle. She never gets around to it, instead making a killer disco tune instead.

As she does this, Choc details the constant barriers women faced in that burgeoning age of electronic music, most notably the way every guy, though he seems to take her seriously, wants a sexual favor in return. And while I’m sure not much has changed on that front, the way Ana perseveres is actually quite inspiring.

Directed by French composer Marc Collin and written with Elina Gakou Gomba, Le Choc du Futur portrays Ana as an anachronistic music geek with definite opinions that wouldn’t seem out of place at a Saturday-afternoon record store argument, especially when she’s decrying how, staring in the face of an electronic frontier, rock and roll is dead.

At the time, no matter how short-lived that time was, she might have been right, too. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Everyone’s favorite husky Mexican wrestler with a mask, a cape and the ability to put wolfmen in headlocks like no other — El Santo, in case I didn’t narrow it down enough for you — is celebrated with this bone-crunchin’ compilation of his greatest triumphs, both in and out of the ring.

Honest talk: I started to find the in-ring footage tedious, as there’s only so much wrestling my brain can take before shuttering operations.

The out-of-ring stuff, however, gives this Something Weird Video assemblage its delirious kick: Santo fights fanged babes; Santo tackles zombies; Santo packs a wallop to a slow-moving, human-eating blob — all in scenes from such south-of-the-border exploits as Santo vs. the Vampire Women, Santo vs. the TV Killer and Santo vs. the Diabolical Hatchet.

As you may infer from the second half of Viva Santo and His Pals’ title, friends occasionally show up. One such pal, Blue Demon, joins in the creature-hunting, back-cracking fun of Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters.

If the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ever see it fit to award Santo a Lifetime Achievement Oscar (and they won’t), the clips have already been selected, and they’re all here in this two-hour collection. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Hey, man, at your next happening — people still have those, right? — don’t stick a sugar cube atop a single tongue until you have the proper atmosphere for your guests.

And by that, I mean the two-hour compilation LSD: Psychedelic Trailers & Shorts. Where else can you be terrified one minute by Sal Mineo’s suggestion of being trapped in a refrigerator, then amused the next as grown adults romp amid a groovy bedroom set with “LSD” spelled on the wall in letters insinuating it’s all going down on the shadiest corner of Sesame Street? (And does it help that the second scenario unfolds to a score that sounds like a 3-year-old dicking around with a theremin?)

From the pushers at dvdrparty, the clip comp begins with the infamous animated chicken from the hysteria-stirring docudrama The Weird World of LSD, which isn’t even the strangest sight here for your bloodshot eyes. That honor goes to the Lockheed-funded classroom scare film LSD: A Case Study, in which a young blonde hallucinates that the hot dog she’s about to eat is screaming and has the face of a Troll doll.

Other scenes shove aside the acts of tuning in and dropping out to emphasize turning on. If it’s not dancing with abandon to dancing between frat-house sheets (Stephen C. Apostolof’s College Girls Confidential), it’s outlining your sex partner’s naked body with whipped cream (Neon Maniacs director Joseph Mangine’s Smoke and Flesh).

Elsewhere, a dozen trailers advertise all sorts of cinematic trips, including Roger Corman’s The Trip, Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Lana Turner-starring The Big Cube and even the made-for-TV adaptation of Go Ask Alice. Whether taken in doses or all at once, the no-frills, far-out party disc presents some of the wackiest depictions of lysergic acid diethylamide ever to make their way to the bijou. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.