Mondo Hollywoodland: ‘Shrooming in the Dream Factory
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Director/producer Janek Ambros is not making grand claims for his new film Mondo Hollywoodland, which, he says, he shot on his iPhone and made for about $10,000 as a tribute to the “mondo” genre.
The word “mondo” (Italian for “world”) came into the culture with the 1962 Italian film, Mondo Cane (Dog’s World), a.k.a. Tales of the Bizarre: Rites, Rituals and Superstitions, a globe-hopping clip collage focusing on the sensational and taboo.
An international success, Mondo Cane opened a rich vein of shlock in quasi-documentary form (Mondo Freudo, Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Hollywood, Mondo Topless etc.), that anticipated reality television and many not-safe-for-work viral videos. Critics dismissed them but late novelist J.G. Ballard was among those who celebrated such disreputable films as helping drive the social and political revolution of the 1960s.
Mondo Hollywoodland is more in the tradition of John Waters’ first feature, Mondo Trasho (1969), an explicitly fictional film in the disjointed, collage style of the tabloid-style docs that were then in style. Billed as a psychedelic comedy, Mondo Hollywoodland’s under-rehearsed performances and loose structure can be distracting though the story is relatively easy to follow.
An unseen narrator “from the fifth dimension” provides voice-over commentary and occasionally interacts with the onscreen characters. His guide to the world of “mondo” is a beardy magic mushroom dealer, Normand Boyle (Chris Blim, who cowrote the script with Ambros and Marcus Hart) a philosophical slacker who has a rat problem in the attic of his rented house and a missing cat.
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Though the mondo genre was born the 1960s, the cinematic touchstones here are from the 1990s: Boyle is Big Lebowski figure in a Magnolia/Mulholland Drive world, where illusions are shredded on their way to the Dream Factory. Boyle explains that the “mondo” of Hollywood is about “titans, weirdos and dreamers” who work together to deny the horror of the world.
The “titans” include coke-addicted producer trying to convince a 17-year-old Disney star Paloma to stick to the script for his new “Twilight in Space” while she points out she makes more from Instagram than his movie can offer.
The “dreamers” include an aspiring actress in a disastrous stage production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and a middle-aged personal trainer desperate to open his own gym. The “weirdos” include a Tarot-reading community organizer, and a group of Venice Beach Antifa enthusiasts who plan to blow up the car of a right-wing social media troll.
In the final segment, various characters come together as a team in the form of a “heist” against a bad political actor, a sequence that has tautness the rest of the film lacks. Comedy might not even be the right description here: The laugh needle rarely rises above “smirk” on the comedy meter, even as the actors employ the kind of pressured speech you associate either with mania, stimulants or vintage sitcoms. But the editing is witty and the mondo spirit of experimentation is, refreshingly, a break from the Hollywood formulaic.
Modo Hollywoodland. Directed by Janek Ambros. Written by Janek Ambros, Chris Bim and Marcus Hart. Starring Chris Bim, Alex Loynaz, Alyssa Sabo, Jessica Jade Andres, Janek Ambros, Miranda Rae Hart, Palmer Jones, Paige Collins and Barry Shay. Available on AmazonPrime Video November 3.