Of all the scenes of torment and cruelty depicted on American movie screens in the 1960s, only to be picked over in detail by TV-addicted grade schoolers on American playgrounds in the ’70s, one nasty, golden moment of genre-film sadism outshines all others. A little more than 10 minutes into Cornell Wilde’s 1966 film “The Naked Prey,” a 19th-century ivory-hunting party in Africa, led by Wilde’s character (identified simply as “Man” in the credits), is taken prisoner by a bush tribe eager to redress an insult.

One by one, the ivory hunters are cudgeled to death, beheaded, and in a classic example of the Rorschach blot approach to storytelling, suffer torments not depicted apart from a set-up equation of leering older men dragging the screaming unfortunate away.

Intercut throughout this sequence, one of the three Europeans taken prisoner has remained bound to a loose tree limb in a forced crouch, breathing through plant stalks jammed into his mouth and nostrils, as tribesmen slather him head to toe in mud. Then, in perhaps American cinema’s most literal definition of “a fate worse than death,” the still breathing man, now mummified in the hardening clay, is hoisted onto a makeshift spit and slowly roasted over an open flame like human tandoori.

Among impressionable young minds not inclined to stoop to more adult psychological responsibilities like credulity and empathy, this fiendish celebration of the resourcefulness of human cruelty belongs in the same forbidden pantheon as the pecked eyes of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and that zombie child with the trowel in George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead.” Apologies to Steve McQueen, but for pre-adolescents raised during the height of America’s cultural cold war — pitting parochial taste and restraint against a growing national appetite for increasingly graphic on-screen depictions of violence — the guy getting baked alive in “The Naked Prey” was the sine qua non of cool.

Outside of schoolyards, “The Naked Prey,” which arrives via a polished and academically appreciative new DVD edition today, was mostly ignored. In his 1967 review, Roger Ebert (then also moonlighting as a screenwriter for nudie auteur Russ Meyer) dismissed Wilde’s film — the bulk of which depicts “Man” as the titular prize in a foot pursuit undertaken by the insulted African warriors — as part of a suspect narrative tradition of white men triumphing over black natives along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Ruark, and other “victims of the Great White Hunter syndrome,” to use Mr. Ebert’s phrase.

When the American Movie Classics channel began airing “The Naked Prey” uncut and letterboxed with all its wide-screen savagery intact during the early 1990s, those of us who recalled the film solely for its moments of snips ‘n’ snails gross-out catharsis were astonished to re-assess Wilde’s relentlessly compelling low-budget achievement on its own cinematic terms. According to the Criterion edition’s commentary track, by Virginia Tech professor and published movie violence authority Stephen Prince, the script for “The Naked Prey,” which was co-written by pulp scenarist Clint Johnston and sometime animator Don Peters, contained barely nine pages of dialogue.

“This reliance on the visuals attracted me,” Wilde, who died of leukemia in 1989, told an interviewer in the October 1970 issue of “Films and Filming.” Instead of using voice-over interior monologue or the emotional road map of a symphonic score (the film’s jungle drum accompaniment is itself a standout) to guide his audience, the actor-director invested his own performance with rational actions and uncluttered reactions. Most impressive, though, behind the camera, Wilde exploited the language of cinema at a gut level of clarity that doesn’t let up for a fraction of a second once the hour-plus chase is on.

“I like to feel there is a reason and impact to every frame of film,” the director elaborated in 1970. “Nothing should be wasted.” Together, Wilde, a former fencing coach, and veteran British cinematographer H.A.R. Thomson suffused every rectangular CinemaScope inch of “The Naked Prey” with a kinesthetic visual dynamism that negates the familiarity of the African nature travelogue just as surgically as the film’s nearly complete absence of moral judgment cancels out Kiplingesque imperial romanticism. Presented in this beautiful new transfer, “The Naked Prey” takes its place alongside the early James Bond film collaborations between director Terrence Young and editor Peter Hunt, and the films of Japan’s low-budget poet of violence, Kihachi Okamoto, who explored a mid-’60s filmmaking frontier where the formally staid widescreen proscenium served a super-sized helping of the ephemeral and irresistible sensory cocktail Alfred Hitchcock dubbed “pure cinema.” One can only hope that this new DVD will be welcomed enough to justify an equally sympathetic exhumation of Wilde’s similarly screen-savvy and unsentimental follow-up, 1967’s “Beach Red.”