April 2: Mondo Madness — Write about a mondo movie.

There was no internet in 1977 and the world was much larger, so the idea of what was in America could be seen as mysterious as countries like Africa that mondo filmmakers had already explored.

Directed and written by Romano Vanderbes (who also made This Is America Part 2, The Sex O’Clock News, America Exposed and the compilation Sex Maniac’s Guide to the U.S.A.), this is also known as Jabberwalk and starts with “America the Beautiful” being played by The Dictators.

The America in this movie is the one that the right warns you about. It’s a place where demolition derbies, pro wrestling — there’s Ivan Putski! — and mud wrestling are our three biggest sports. Polygamy, nude beaches are packed, love boutiques are shopped by teenage girls, quick divorce and fast marriage is the order of the day, plus there are rentable BDSM dungeons, group sex encounter groups, dildo factories and legal brothels are everywhere. Even when people decide to actually get married, they go to the Poconos and have to undertake mandatory gun shooting classes to prepare them for the cities and suburbs of the United States where violence is a celebrated fact of life. Even church is just done inside your car now so you can keep moving to whatever is next, which is usually sex or death or being hooked up to electrodes that shock you when you eat too many french fries. Sorry. Freedom fries.

Also known as Crazy Ridiculous American People, this has everything from Don Imus hosting the 1975 Miss All Bare American pageant to a worship ceremony at the Church of Satan (incorrectly saying that people get so excited that they start hurting one another during rituals), a dildo salesman, the Eros Awards for pornography — look for Fanne Fox, Bree Anthony, female rock band Isis, Ron Jeremy, C.J. Laing, Marc Stevens, Helen Madigan, Darby Lloyd Rains and naked people painted silver — as well as Arnold casually walking out of a Gold’s Gym, the AccuJack masturbation machine, a man getting his penis tattooed, hot dogs being made, a clown church, suicide’s being fished out of the water around the Golden Gate Bridge (by the way, when my wife and I were first dating, she made me watch The Bridge doc about this while drunk and I was worried why I was allowing her in my house and now we’ve been married for nine years), cryogenics, drive-in funerals, brothels for senior men where older women are paid five and even ten dollars to sleep with them, a bank robbery, the many deaths in an Indianapolis 500 race, co-ed prisons, Mormon men with twelve wives and so much more.

At one point, before that internet I discussed at the open and the one you’re reading this on now, these movies were shocking. Then again, Vanderbes is Dutch and should know all about Amsterdam and that America is pretty puritanical, but maybe in 1977 we were all about sex before Reagan and the Religious Right and AIDS.

It’s all voiced over by Norman Rose, who narrated Harold and the Purple Crayon, Tennessee Tuxedo, Message from Space, Pinocchio in Outer Space, War Between the Planets and Destroy All Monsters. He’s also Mr. Smith, the perverted dirty caller who gets Alice so excited in The Telephone Book.

What really gets me is that no matter how much sex is in this movie, there’s also the specter of Americanized violence leading everything. Our country was won by the gun and as movies like this and The Killing of America remind me, this kind of bloodshed that we gives hopes and prayers for every time and say that we can’t stop it and then it happens every single day. But it was like that in 1977 too as this movie continually reminds us. Worse, if it can get that way, kids today are upset about anything sexual while also fascinated, but not enough to make anything artistic or awesome. What I;m saying is that the 1970s of this movie are so far away that they only exist in this amber-grasp of VHS scuzz.

You can watch this on YouTube.