And the madness continues. Intercut with all of this is modern footage, much of it seemingly stock. There's a New Orleans jazz funeral that's probably a Mondo Cane outtake and that is overlaid with almost completely non-related narration. There's a scene from a rally during comedian Dick Gregory's run for president in 1968, and it includes a bit of narration that I feel like sums up the filmmaker's race war feelings in a delightful nutshell: 'What makes this candidate for the White House exceptional is that his political program does not include cutting the throats of all white Americans. Perhaps this is why he wasn't very successful.' Amazing.

It's hard to pick out one scene in Addio Zio Tom that is the most offensive, but if pressed I may go with the Fellini-esque sequence where a black dwarf huckster takes the camera on a tour of a black whorehouse. By now we're used to the degredation of women in the film, so when Too Short's great grandfather tears their tops off, we're not moved. But a scene where young boys are painted silver by a grotesquely caricatured gay man goes beyond the pale. The camera lingers on the painted penises of these kids and you have to wonder who applied that paint. What was it like on set that day? Can the FBI raid my house for owning this? In comparison to this abject nastiness the next scene, a re-enactment of the story of a New Orleans woman who sexually abused and murdered her slaves, comes across as totally tame.

As Addio Zio Tom hits the two hour mark (!), the whole thing feels like a bad fever dream. But the true delirium is just about to happen. Jacopetti and Prosperi have spent 120 minutes sending their mixed messages about race, but now they make their ultimate statement - it's again the modern day and a black man with an Afro dressed like a minister is on a Miami beach, trying to read William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. We see his mind's eye imaginings of the slave-in-revolt's murders of white families, and he imagines axe murdering the annoying white people on the beach around him. The whole movie reaches a bizarre climax here, as the blood soaked killings are played in loving detail, including a baby being beaten to death against a wall. There's no judgment here - the filmmakers are more or less siding with the idea that these honkies should be iced. These Italians know how to make a movie, and these scenes are flat out intoxicating. Watching Black Panther types take axes to white families (with that Ortolani music on the soundtrack!) never felt so good.

The film's final moment makes sure things go out on an insane bang. The Styron-reading black radical sits in the sand and a young white boy's beach ball bounces to him. The black minister holds the ball in his hands and stares at the boy, his grip tightening. The ball explodes and he grins... and freeze frame and credits. It's incredible!

As the credits roll you can't help but be dazed. What the fuck did you just watch? Was that a movie that hates black people and wants to do nothing more than humiliate them, or was it a movie that wants to incite a black revolution? I think it's both - these filmmakers were sleazy exploitationers, and they knew that they could appeal to the urban black grindhouse patrons with the race war bullshit and the southern white drive in people with the constant demeaning of blacks. And both audiences were pretty interested in seeing rape, tits and violence, so it was win/win all around. In many ways the schizophrenic nature of Addio Zio Tom is its greatest triumph - it's a movie that is what you make of it. Of course it's still a deeply evil piece of work, whatever you make of it, but this is a film calculated to appeal to - and deeply offend - audiences both white and black.

It will be hard to top Addio Zio Tom in the CHUDsploitation column for the simple fact that it's one of the few exploitation films that retains just as much power today as it had when it was released (it probably has even more, as the uncut version, with all the race war stuff, was only recently available in America). Part of the movie's power comes from the quality of the filmmaking, which has kept it from aging as badly as its slapdash grindhouse brethren, but much of it comes from the sheer extreme aspects of Jacopetti and Prosperi's vision. I keep mentioning the fact that it took them three years to make this movie because I am astounded at their commitment to this sickness. Most exploitation films would be quickies, shot in a minimal number of days and tossed onto the circuit as soon as possible so as to begin making money right away. Three years qualifies any movie as a passion project, and what does it say about the souls of men whose passion project is a diseased piece of trash like Addio Zio Tom? The best exploitation films carry the marks of the men who made them, their kinks and quirks and obsessions. After this movie the duo would go on to make one more movie together, the pornographic S&M epic Mondo Candido, apparently a take on Candide (I've never had the opportunity to see this film, so I'm just reporting what I've read); between the dehumanizing cruelty of Addio Zio Tom and the graphic S&M scenes of Mondo Candido, I think we can guess what Jacopetti and Prosperi's foibles and kinks were.

In Mondo Cane and Africa Addio, Jacopetti and Prosperi had tried to expose the worst of humanity for our shock and pleasure. The amazing thing about Addio Zio Tom is that when they ran out of real world ways to do it, they began to just manufacture it themselves. This film is among the most morally horrible things a human being has ever created, a true landmark in the annals of depravity, a work that outshines de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom in terms of sickness if only because these inhuman Italians used not just pen and paper to express their debased fantasies but the very flesh of real people. I dare even the most cynical person to watch Addio Zio Tom and not find new reasons to hate humanity.