20 October 2020
PopMatters has been avidly following Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray series called Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture, yet we were hardly prepared for Volume 8. In his commentary track, curator and historian Bret Wood calls the film a “sprawling, dishonest, spectacular, offensive, inhumane hodge-podge of a motion picture”, and he’s the one producing the disc.
Resurfacing like a sour dream from America’s cinematic subconscious is a long-suppressed phony documentary,
Ingagi (1930), an overwhelmingly profitable and controversial release banned for false advertising by the Federal Trade Commission. Here treated to a 4K restoration from two tinted Library of Congress prints, it’s at once among the most tiresome specimens of the series and one of the most revealing and culturally significant.