Ingagi is a 1930 Mockumentary Exploitation Film, following the expeditions of Great White Hunter duo Sir Hubert Winstead and Captain Daniel Swayne, as they venture into Darkest Africa to collect animal specimens. While there, the hear of a terrifying local custom: supposedly, a nearby tribe sacrifices its women to a troop of Killer Gorillas as a way to avoid gorilla attacks. The gorillas take the women as sex slaves, and, allegedly, hybrid children have even been produced. Winstead and Swayne set out to put a stop to this, along the way running into unique local fauna.
The film passed itself off as a legitimate documentary when it was first released, but was quickly exposed by those who saw through it. The American Society of Mammalogists investigated, and discovered that Winstead and Swayne were not real people at all. The producers were also sued after it was revealed that some of the safari scenes had been stolen from an earlier, legitimate documentary. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association withdrew their approval after the fakery came to light. However, proving that there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, the news that it was a lie attracted new audiences, who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This made Ingagi a box-office success, and inspired RKO Radio Pictures to invest in Killer Gorilla films to attract those same profits. Yes, it's very possible that there would be no King Kong without Ingagi!
It spawned an unofficial sequel, Son Of Ingagi, in 1940. The first horror film with an all-black cast, Son Of Ingagi follows a female Mad Scientist who is keeping an ape-monster in a cage in her basement.
Ingagi contains the following tropes:
- Darkest Africa: The opening text crawl uses this exact phrase when describing Winstead and Swayne's expedition. All the trope's hallmarks are on full display, from killer animals at every turn, to Hollywood Natives with backwards customs.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: The title means "gorilla" in the Kinyarwanda language.
- Heinous Hyena: A hyena is spotted near the camp, and is implied to be a man-eater. The explorers shoot at it to scare it off. There's also a creepy close-up of one sneering and doing the infamous laugh.
- Killer Gorilla: The gorillas regularly raid a nearby tribe. To appease them, the tribe sacrifices one of their women to the beasts. It turns out that the gorillas are holding the women as sex slaves, and even breeding with them.
- Male Gaze: The narrator is sure to point out that "African women are quite shapely", as footage of the women doing their chores is shown.
- Mama Bear: The explorers find a crocodile nest and play around with the eggs and young. This attracts the angry parents, who hiss at the explorers as the narrator deadpans, "The old lady objected to our presence".
- Misplaced Wildlife: An armadillo is seen in the camp. It is also portrayed as a scavenger and referred to as "graverobber".
- Robbing the Dead: After killing a crocodile that had allegedly eaten a human woman, the men cut it open and discover it was indeed the killer, as the woman's jewelry is still inside it. The tribesmen who came along for the adventure readily take the jewelry for themselves.
- Slurpasaur: The "tortadillo", a venomous reptile that the explorers discover on the expedition, is really just a tortoise with fake wings and a tail glued on.
- Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying: So much that the American Society of Mammalogists protested the film and launched an investigation into it.
- For one, the Killer Gorilla trope is on full display. Here, they are aggressive beasts that attack human villages unprovoked, and enslave and mate with human women. We now know, thanks to the work of ethologists like Dian Fossey, that gorillas are generally nonviolent. Needless to say, interbreeding between gorillas and humans is also not possible.
- An armadillo appears in Africa, and is described as a scavenger, called "graverobber" by the narrator.
