{{loaderText}}
Newly Added About Us News Guide Blog Join

More Mondo 🤪 Movie Madness

01-06-2022

"Pigalle Crossing of Illusions" (1973)

We had a Mondo double week earlier this year, but we barely scratched the surface of great Mondo films, so we go mad for more weird films that can best be described as travelogues from around the world that show off the strangest, sexiest and scariest things you could ever thing of. All of it completely true and none of it staged at all.

"Pigalle Crossing of Illusions" (1973) - Spy thriller about stripper smuggling microfilm (poster above), but really just an excuse to show off lots of striptease and erotic acts from Moulin Rouge and other Pigalle venues. Include cowboy acts. (In Paris? Pourquois cowboys?). This is a restoration project that Cultpix was closely involved in and the kind of thing we plan to do more of with EGFF.

"Mondo Balordo" (1964) - Boris Karloff guides us through a world "throbbing and pulsing with love, from the jungle orgies of primitive tribes to sin-filled evenings of the London sophisticate." And Bedouin pimps - or maybe Lebanese - amorous dwarves, Spanish transvestites, German lesbians, Indian exorcists and more.

"Mondo Freudo" & "Mondo Bizarro" (1966) - We have visionary American 'scumbags' Lee Frost and Bob Cresse to thank for adding an American twist to the Mondo genre with their Olympic International films. "Possibly the creepiest of all the Mondo films," according to Kitty Lash (who joined us for the podcast about Mondo), but sexy in bits depending on your fetish and "strangely erotic". Mondo Bizarro also has an opening credit sequence and music track ripe to be ripped off by Quentin Tarantino, that takes place in a women’s changing room. You MUST see it, if only for this.

"Mondo Freudo" (1966)

"The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield" (1968) - In which we are taken on a tour of Rome and Paris by Jayne Mansfield (pictured below), before she is then killed in a car accident (though not decapitated). Graphic, horrific footage from the crash. Made after her death, the film is narrated by a Mansfield sound-alike, talking about getting her bum pinched in Rome and interviewing tranny beauty queens. Her death car can be seen as part Scott Michael's Dearly Departed tours of Los Angeles. A strange puppy of a film.

"Mondo Pazzo", aka "Mondo Cane 2" (1963) - Sequel to their ground-breaking shockumentary Mondo Cane is another beautifully photographed but equally disturbing crackpot travelogue of global gross-outs and international insanity. human pincushions parade, a whorehouse on wheels, tortillas with live insects, strippers wrapped in toilet paper… you get the idea.

"Mondo Pazzo" (1963)

"Kwaheri" (1964) - We now go into darkest Africa. Warning: this Mondo film was the most stomach churning of all the ones we watched in preparation for the Mondo week, with the open skull brain surgery by the African witch doctor. Cannot be unseen! Plus "wild orgies of the body and mind," whatever that means.

"Malamondo" (1964) - Early Mondo film about weird teens doing things like skiing nude, distinguished by the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. The score does not so much support the pictures as beautiful photography seemingly there "to give visual accompaniment to a hauntingly sublime score."

"Mondo Keazunt" (1955) - Four Italians cross the "Green Hell" of the Amazon, with snake fights and piranhas eating a cow alive. Keazuntheit!

Don't miss the sublime Spotify Mondo score collection and we promise to have Kitty Lash back soon. We end it with a brilliant Mondo radio ad.

More

More "Mondo Pazzo" (1963)