Mandingo.

Reviewing "an extremely mixed bag" of titles from Legend Films and Paramount Pictures, the New York Times' Dave Kehr finds that the "big title in this first group is Richard Fleischer's 1975 Mandingo, a back-alley parody of Gone With the Wind based on a lascivious 1957 best seller by Kyle Onstott. All that dewy-eyed antebellum melodramas so carefully repress returns here with a vengeance."

"I sincerely hope that with the release of Mandingo on DVD that some revisionism regarding its status as a 'so-bad-it's-good' camp classic will begin to take place," writes Dennis Cozzalio in a longish appreciation that, towards its close, quotes from Zach Campbell's 2006 piece for the Film Journal: "'Simply put, Mandingo is a monstrous hybrid, and thank god for it.' And it is a monstrous hybrid that our current hyper self-conscious film culture could probably never hope to replicate. Even if it could, would we know what to do with such a film any more than we did in 1975?"

"Audiences at the time flocked to it even as critics foamed over its "trashiness" and "immorality,'" notes Fernando F Croce in Slant; "today it seems relegated to movies-we-love-to-hate cultists when it should be discussed side by side with Toni Morrison's novels and Spike Lee's sharpest provocations." As for this release, though, it's a "shamefully bare-bones DVD for a shamefully neglected film."

"Fleischer's revival of late might not rest safely on this treacherous ground (not with Violent Saturday, 10 Rillington Place, The Spikes Gang around), but if this 'trashy' world reeks, it's for good reason," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2008 1:40 PM