Four years after they made the incredible horror-themed nudie-cutie, House on Bare Mountain, director Lee Frost and star Bob Cresse collaborated on a one-two punch of Mondo movies. Mondo Bizarro was the second film of the pair. It follows a “hidden camera” format that allows the audience to peer into places like a lingerie shop in Chicago where we spy on women in dressing rooms, a voodoo ritual in the Bahamas (the ceremony is fake but the animals that are sacrificed are very real), and massage parlors in Japan while a solemn narrator intones wisdom like, “The cadaver is infinity!”
Most of this is as phony as a three-dollar bill (the way the filmmakers try to preserve the subject’s “anonymity” via negative scratches over faces, license plates, and pubic regions was a nice touch though) and some bits are more amusing than others. Interestingly enough, the sequences that feel the least staged are the most effective, like the behind the scenes look at the inner workings of Frederick’s of Hollywood. Compare that to the silly scene of the restaurant that serves broken glass for the patrons to eat. It’s painfully obvious it’s fake from the start and goes on much too long. The sequence about a Nazi sex play almost seems like a warm-up for Frost’s Love Camp 7 too.
The prolonged scene set in LA works best. It mixes in everything from male hustling to the obscenely overpriced art scene to Vietnam protests. It’s then ironic that for a Mondo movie about oddities across the globe, the filmmakers find their most interesting subjects in their own backyard.
Like any Mondo movie, it’s bound to be uneven. There are some queasy moments (like when the guy jabs a needle through his cheek and forearm) and scenes that feel more like padding than anything. (The extended preparations for the Lebanese “slave auction” eat up precious screen time near the end of the film.) However, while the overall quality of the individual segments varies, the film itself is consistently entertaining throughout. If you’re a Mondo movie fan, you’re sure to enjoy this one.
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