And now we come to the big question. Was Mondo Balordo even worth $4? The answer is yes, but only just. Mondo movies, even more than most exploitative trash, have a history of promising the most shocking and disturbing images you could ever hope to see on a video screen, and then delivering little more than the usual Indian fakirs shoving skewers through their tongues. Mondo Balordo had two big draws to suck the audiences in: it has a woman using camel whiz as hair dye, and it’s narrated by Boris “Will Do Overdubs For Food” Karloff.

Mondo Balordo (which means “Crazy world” in Italian) opens with slide after slide of text, blabbering on about love and life and cycles and not really making a lot of sense, but giving you a vague feeling that the movie is supposed to be themed around love and reproduction and the cycle of life. Why then, right after the hippy love vibe, Karloff says that we are about to see real-life scenes more macabre and strange than anything in the movies I have no idea. Then it’s time to tear off into barrage of scenes with little or no reason to be shown back to back other than that it was all the filmmakers had to use.

A midget rock singer impersonator segues into stagehands cleaning up after a scene for a Hercules movie (one of the more confusing and pointless segments) segues into a goofy vocal coach making old ladies look like jackasses segues into a beauty pageant and a stripper segues into a bondage photographer and strange Chinese girl wrestling segues into a zebra being eaten by a lion segues into an elephant being speared to death segues into some Swedish guy marrying a hooker segues into awkard Germans getting drunk and playing accordions and dancing in silly hats segues into hideous German transvestite singing cabaret segues into islanders catching and hacking up giant sea turtles (aside from the elephant hunting, the only violent image in the movie) segues into witch doctors segues into cocaine and opium addicts both in the jungle and the city segues into some blathering about floods and rain and baptism segues into the Berlin wall segues into people in Naples praying to dead relatives segues into the reincarnation of Rudolph Valentino segues into sewage removal in small-town Italy segues into some goofy-ass artist party segues into a puppy hospital (which makes the whole stupid movie worth sitting through, because puppies are great) segues to the previously mentioned camel urine hair dye segues into a marriage ceremony in Papua, New Guinea segues into dancing in Africa and a gay Gary Busey-lookalike rock singer segues into more young Germans camping segues into voyeurs at the beach. And for some reason, that’s your closure. The end. And if you’re saying to yourself, wait, that was just one big, stupid, pointless, run-on sentence with no real noticeable subject or ending, well, then you know what it feels like to have sat down and watched this movie.

In closing, a couple of things. One, what was the deal with the 60’s stomach crease? This was made in 1964, right at the height of the stomach crease crisis. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up any skin pictures from the 60’s and look at the girl’s torso. What the fuck is that crease doing there? How did it get there? And how did it disappear into the 70’s? The world may never know. And finally, however boring they may be, I’ve always found mondo flicks to be an interesting time capsule of how extremely bizarre western filmmakers viewed the world in the 60’s and 70’s. Granted, the truly hideous and trashy mondo flicks like Mondo Cane and Adios Uncle Tom are much more interesting and entertaining than a tame, third-tier snore fest like Mondo Balordo, but even the lamest mondo generally has one or two oddities hidden up its sleeve to capture the imagination. If nothing else, the jarring, nonsensical editing and narration throwing you from one unconnected scene to the next will at least give you a feeling similar to doing a bunch of whip-its and going on the tilt-a-whirl.

BONUS REVIEW!
Sinister Menace
(1932)

Reviewed By Ragnarok

Genre: Egyptian Druge Abuse Scare Movie
Cast & Crew: There's no listing for this movie in the Internet Movie Data Base, so damned if I know...