Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Mondo Cane 2 (1963): New Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Portugal, Australia, America and beyond, no country is safe when Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi have their cameras rolling. Paolo Cavara, who helped make Mondo Cane, had moved on to make other films, including Black Belly of the Tarantula and Plot of Fear.
This time around, their journey takes us through vivisections, lynchings, tranvestitites, sex clubs, alligator hunts and a trip to a mortician’s school. Everything in this consists of cutting room footage of the first film, including a scene where a monk sets himself ablaze that was totally faked with the help of special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi.
As the mondo had grown beyond their film, this time Jacopetti and Prosperi go abti-establishment, even laughing about how the dog scenes in the original movie kept them off screens in England. They’re incredulous and probably desensitized over all that they have seen.
Mondo Freudo (1966): Mondo Freudo is all about “a world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it,” as told by two absolute maniacs: the producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, with Cresse himself ranting as we try and make it through another swing through the world of mondo.
Hollywood strippers, Tijuana hookers, London lesbians, Asian sex shows, Times Square Satanists and topless Watusi clubs. Hidden cameras have recorded everything from teenagers making out to a Mexican slave market, a Black Mass near Times Square, while we also see people get painted, beaten and wrestle in mud.
Cresse would go on to make Love Camp 7 and plenty of other upsetting — or awesome — movies before his life fell apart one day while he walked his dog. Coming across two men beating a woman in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, Cresse pulled his gun and ordered the men to stop. Turns out they were cops and shot him in the stomach and then killed his dog. He’d spend seven months in the hospital with no health insurance, losing most of his fortune.
Frost would make The Black Gestapo and put sex inserts into a foreign mondo all about the occult, creating the near-classic Witchcraft ’70. He was smart enough to not fight any police.
Ecco (1963): Offsetting the globetrotting shock of this film — watch a woman bite off a reindeer’s scrotum with her bare teeth! — is the voice of George Sanders, perhaps way too sophisticated a man for such an endeavor. That said, money is money, and it’s time for Gianni Proia to take us all around This Shocking World (the other title for this mondo).
Beyond the expected lesbians and strippers — show me a mondo that doesn’t have those and it’s amazing that I am seeing them as commonplace at this point — you also get a trip to the original Grand Guignol and get to watch a man repeatedly impale himself.
The US version — re-edited with a new commentary by absolute maniac Bob Cresse and with an Italian title that means “look here” — adds scenes from World by Night No. 2, another Proia mondo, with bodybuilding showgirls, Roller Derby and some vacation footage. Consider it like watching snaps from holiday, except the vacation goers have no compunction showing you absolute filth.
Mondo Balordo (1964): Albert T. Viola — yes, the same man who wrote, directed, produced and starred in Preacherman — completed the American version of this film, known as A Fool’s World in Italy. There, it was directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero, who also made the mondos Africa Sexy, Orient By Night, Sexy Nudo, Sexy nel Mondo, Universo Proibito and Superspettacoli nel Mondo. He would go on to make So Sweet, So Dead.
Imagine a world “throbbing and pulsing with love, from the jungle orgies of primitive tribes to sin-filled evenings of the London sophisticate.” Now imagine those very same words coming out of the mouth of Boris Karloff.
Here are just some of the folks you will meet and sights you will see: a dwarf singer, bodybuilders, bedouin pimps, Japanese models for rent, Indian exorcists, people who can’t stop smoking, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lottery players, a clone of Valentino, high end rich dogs, a Borneo version of Romeo and Juliet, cults, nightclubs, Luna Park, London after hours and so much more.
Mondo Bizarro (1966): “To the worm in the cheese, the cheese is the universe. To the maggot in the cadaver, the cadaver is infinity. And to you, what is your world? How do you know what is beyond the Beyond? Most of us don’t even know what is behind the Beyond.”
Mondo Bizarro blew my mind and it hadn’t even started yet.
Much like all of the Lee Frost and Bob Cresse mondos, this is a mix of both documentary and faked footage. Sure, that one way glass in a changing room is fake, but hey, Frederick’s of Hollywood is real, even if it shows up in so many mondo films that I lose track of which one is which.
This one also has a man sticking nails in his skin and eating glass, the hippies of Los Angeles, Germans watching a Nazi play. Cresse must have been, umm, Cresse-ing his jeans, seeing as how he played a German officer in Love Camp 7 with such aufregung.
The duo also used a high-powered lens to capture what they describe as a Lebanese white-slavery auction. Never mind that it’s obviously Bronson Canyon, the setting for everything from Night of the Blood Beast to Equinox, Octaman and, most famously, the entrance to the Batcave in the 1960’s TV show.
Make no bones about it. This is junk. But it’s entertaining junk.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.