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Released by: Woodhaven
Released on: 3/23/2004
Directors: Thor L. Brooks, Byron Chudnow
Cast: Les TreymaneYear: 1964
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The Movie
The word kwaheri translates into English as 'farewell.' The supposed premise of this Mondo style documentary is to show the viewer how Africa has changed - how the modern world is encroaching upon the ancient tribal customs and religions of the continent. In a sense, the film purports to be saying 'farewell' to the old Africa as the 'new Africa' brought about by social changes in the late fifties and early sixties brings the Dark Continent into line with the rest of the civilized world. Or so the opening narration would have us believe.
After a few opening scenes of beautiful African scenery, naked tribes-people, animal violence and the like, we witness a child with an eye infection the size of an orange. It's from here that the narrator tells of us an expedition that we're now going to witness in which the filmmakers will attempt to hunt down a true witch doctor. So off we go, witnessing some snakes, spiders, waterfalls, and elephants along the way. We hear of problems in the country as poachers illegally kill game for various purposes, and we see some of this in action. We trek through caves, around beautiful waterfalls, avoid Black Mambas and angry rhinos and eventually wind up at the village that the witch doctor calls home.
And low and behold, we've arrived just in time to see him perform brain surgery on a local woman using no anesthetic and only the most primitive of hand made tools. The 'New Africa' has outlawed these primitive practices in favor of more modern medicine, but the narrator claims that this doctor has a ninety-six percent success ratio. That's rather hard to believe as we see him remove a piece of her skull, scrape out some of her brainy goop, and then seal her head back up using only tightly wound banana leaves, even stopping for a beer break in the middle of the operation. But at the end of it all, the patient seems to be ok. Maybe a little woozy, but considering she just had her skull opened and her brain scraped, she looks to be in pretty good shape.
Once this is down, there's only one thing left for the filmmakers to show us - a ritual orgy! Yep, here we get to see a bunch of naked Pygmies dancing and whooping it up in their native environment. When they grab a virgin, wrap her in ceremonial leaves and sacrifice her to some dark god, it's all good. It's also likely all fake, as we never really see the girl on fire, just wrapped in leaves which are then burned high atop a wooden structure. The narrator concludes our journey by wishing the old Africa a found farewell saying 'Kwaheri, old Africa' in his deep and sophisticated sounding voice.
Interestingly enough, Kwaheri is narrated by Les Treymane, who provided some voice acting for The Challenge Of The GoBots and dubbed a few Kaiju films like Rodan and King Kong Versus Godzilla. He also played Boss Hog's father on an episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard. This Mondo Cane knock-off was produced by Americans (most were Italian) and the films producer, David Chudnow, would later work with the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschel Gordon Lewis.
Something Weird Video also has this title available on DVD-R from their website, and I've no idea if the quality is any better or not. They do claim that their release is mastered from a 35mm print though, so it's entirely possible that it is of better quality.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The film is presented fullframe at 1.33.1, and this appears to be the way it was intended to be seen. None of the compositions appear compromised and most of the other Mondo films from this period are also fullframe, so I'm assuming this is correct. Video quality is quite poor and a tape drop out early on indicates that this was likely taken from a VHS source. Colors are faded and mute looking, and the picture is quite soft. It's watchable, but just barely.
The audio presentation fares slightly better than the video presentation. Narration remains fairly consistent throughout and while it never sounds really good, it never sounds really bad either. The Dolby Digital Mono track is of sufficient quality to get the job done, though it would have been nice if it had been cleaned up a bit as there is some hiss in a few spots.
From the menu screen, we can access the films original theatrical trailer and three other trailers for unrelated releases.
The Final Word:
The presentation leaves more than a little to be desired but the film has its moments. The first half is a little slow and doesn't really show us anything we haven't seen before, feeling more like a National Geographic film, but the last half hour more than makes up for it and the two final scenes make Kwaheri worth checking out.