Ingagi

1930 film

Ingagi is a 1930 pre Code pseudo documentary exploitation film directed by William S. Campbell. It purports to be a documentary about "Sir Hubert Winstead" of London on an expedition to the Belgian Congo, and depicts a tribe of gorilla worshipping women encountered by the explorer. The film claims to show a ritual in which African women are given over to gorillas as sex slaves, but in actuality was mostly filmed in Los Angeles, using American actresses in place of natives. It was produced and distributed by Nat Spitzer's Congo Pictures, which had been formed expressly for this production. Although marketed under the pretense of being ethnographic, the premise was a fabrication, leading the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association to retract any involvement. The film trades heavily on its nudity and on the suggestion of sex between a woman and a gorilla. Its success motivated RKO Radio Pictures to invest in the 1933 film, King Kong. RKO owned several of the theatres where Ingagi was shown, including one of the first, the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, where it opened April 5, 1930.

The film starts with a text introduction, explaining the purported documentary background, then shows life aboard ship before it docks at Mombasa. They then travel inland to Nairobi, seeing African wildlife such as wildebeest on the way

Much of the footage featured in the film was taken without permission from Grace Mackenzie's 1915 film Heart of Africa, which later resulted in legal action being brought against Congo Pictures by Mackenzie's son. The majority of the original footage was filmed at the Griffith Park Zoo. It was reported that Congo Pictures prepared versions of Ingagi dubbed in French, German, and Spanish. Sources have claimed that the word "ingagi" cannot be found "in any African language dictionary". In response, Congo Pictures filed a lawsuit against the MPPDA seeking $3,365,000 in damages, claiming that the MPPDA had "circulated reports doubting the authenticity of the film". An investigation by the Federal Trade Commission concluded that the majority of the film was "false, fraudulent, deceptive and misleading", and ordered Congo Pictures to withdraw any advertising and material from the film proclaiming it to be genuine. 96 seconds of the film are included in the documentary Charlie Gemora: Uncredited. In partnership with Something Weird Video, Kino Classics released a 4K restoration of the film on Blu ray Disc on January 5, 2021.

Film critic Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times that the film "is a loose assemblage of the usual African travel scenes, many of which are spoiled by extraordinarily bad photography," that "the screen is a miserable blur for minutes at a time," that "the scenes with gorillas last about ten minutes and are not at all convincing," but noted that "the trapping of a leopard, the capture of a giant python and a hippopotamus hunt might be genuinely interesting." A contemporary review of the film in Variety reported that "photography is poor" and "the ape women are seen completely naked, but shadowed in a clearing [and] they are not as black as expected for the jungle" with "doubt concerning the naturalness of the gorilla," but noted that "there is a gripping scene when a lioness attacks a cameraman [with] no doubt of the authenticity of this frightful but vivid scene." From retrospective reviews, Michael Atkinson reviewed the home video release in Sight & Sound. Atkinson found the film "distinctive for portending to be something it absolutely is not", noting the film's litany of large animals killed and butchered and its "wall to wall" supremacist stereotypes, while finding the footage taken from other films uproarious. A review of the film on DVD Talk noted that it is "fascinating even if it's not entirely fun. There's definitely some interest in the classic wildlife footage, but the continued brutality of the hunters (which admittedly is not shown as explicitly as it could be) eventually becomes deadening. And the way the black characters are treated whether it's the actual African natives put down by the narration or the American actors put into demeaning situations is so offputting and infuriating that it would derail any self respecting Bad Movie Night."

Congo Pictures followed Ingagi with an unsuccessful film titled Nu Ma Pu Cannibalism in 1931, featuring much of the same crew. Like Ingagi, it purported to be a documentary, but was mostly fictitious. The 1940 film Son of Ingagi, while not a sequel, is the first all African American horror film and features a house haunted by a female mad scientist and her missing link monster. In 1947, Charlie Gemora announced his plans to direct and star in a jungle adventure movie that contemporary newspapers described as a sequel of Ingagi. However, the project never came to fruition.