MOVING PICTURES

THIS LOVE LETTER TO PSYCHEDELIC HOLLYWOOD IS ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST MOVIES

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Mondo films are the goofy and ghastly sub-genre offspring born of the unholy union of exploitation films and documentary movies. The genre generally traces its name back to Mondo Cane (1962).

The title is a slight Italian curse — a dog’s world — and this film’s pioneering production traveled from Castellaneta, Italy to destinations all over the world to capture ethnographic scenes that might seem especially strange and shocking to Western sensibilities. In the finished film the scenes stream one after the other with a narrator guiding viewers through its tour of the taboo, the bizarre and the forbidden.

As you might imagine Mondo Cane is tasteless, xenophobic and adolescent. Of course this also made it a big hit, and inspired a slew of even more tasteless movies in its wake. The mondo wave hit the West Coast when Mondo Hollywood was released in 1967. The film mirrored Mondo Cane’s vignette structure, but focused its camera on the Los Angeles entertainment industry underground, its sex-and-drugs counterculure and the social unrest of Vietnam War protests and the aftermath of the Watts Riot. Variety described Mondo Hollywood as a “flippy, trippy psychedelic guide to Hollywood,” and the film is now considered a cult classic. The movie is also enjoying something of a renaissance: Paul Thomas Anderson introduced the movie and interviewed its one-man-film-crew, Robert Carl Cohen at AFI Fest back in 2014. And now a new independent film inspired by Mondo Hollywood turns its twisted lens on Tinsel Town today.

Mondo Hollywoodland is a psychedelic mockumentary that tips its hat to the mondo genre with its three vignette structure and its overbearing narrator who is trying to discover the meaning of the word “mondo.” The first person narrator meets a man with addiction struggles on the street. The man tells him that Hollywood is “mondo” and points the narrator to a mysterious drug dealer who uses magic mushrooms and an enchanted mirror to discern the three cosmic tribes that make-up 21st century Hollywood: Titans, Weirdos and Dreamers. The film then follows the drug dealer and his friends through a number of loosely connected scenes involving his clients who are all actors, agents, producers, and heavy drug users who aren’t very bright. The drug dealer gets lost in a mushroom haze before arming himself to the teeth in a fit of paranoia. An antifa unit can’t agree about how to attack a neo-nazi and a community organizer uses psilocybin and tarot cards to guide her dream of creating a political movement. It turns out that narwhals are actually Russian nuclear submarines disguised as animals. A third generation failed actress dreams of stardom while her manager gets blackout drunk at an Oscar Awards watch party. A personal fitness trainer assures viewers that with a healthy mind and a healthy body “nothing can stop you.” The actress rehearses a scene from Anton Chekov’s The Seagull while her director orders Chinese food and the personal trainer purchases a new space for his own gym after getting a loan from the drug dealer. There’s a car bombing and a heist, and a disagreement about the merits of the old television comedy Mad About You. A lost cat is found.

Mondo Hollywoodland’s fractured storyline is punctuated by excellent music, creative sound design, hallucinatory visual effects and entire sequences that threaten to pull the whole production into a purely experimental realm of fantastic cinematic sensation. This bonkers plot and these technical experiments are married to Mondo Hollywoodland’s deadpan commitment to its gonzo sense of humor which seems to be informed by lots of freewheeling improvisation from this talented cast of actors and their director, Janek Ambrose.

This movie is the perfect warm-up for Nashville psychedelic cinema devotees before the Defy Fest brings its experimental film program back to the 615 Studio in East Nashville in August. Mondo Hollywoodland is one of my favorite films of 2021 and it premiered on Amazon Prime on Aug. 3.

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.