The Mating Urge (1958)

• 57%
• 1958
• Ray Phoenix

An exploitation pot-boiler, posing as an anthropology art-film, and supposedly filmed by seventeen different cameraman in Africa, Malaya, India, Ceylon, Bali, New Guinea and New Hebrides. It probably was over about that many different years, as it is stock-and-archive footage from front-to back, including the New Hebrides segment, where the males have to leap from tall trees (and towers) with a vine attached to their ankles that stops them just short of a grand splattering on hard New Hebrides ground. An early-day version of bungee-jumping that is a macho-virility proving exercise that delights the village maidens. The art-house aspects and come-on was that it depicted strange love-rites in strange lands, even if some of them were re-enactments in color, in places of the black-and-white stock footage that had been serving in several reincarnations over the years. Highlights include "The Dance of the Fertility Tree" and "The Peek-A-Boo Betrothal." A few National Geographic-type scenes of nudity, and that's the closest it gets to even PG movies. The keywords must have been added by the DVD distributors.