Sunday, February 20, 2011

Mondo Trasho (1969)

Mondo Trasho is the second full length feature from the Pope Of Trash, John Waters. It was shot silently on 16mm and instead of dubbing in diologue we get a cool soundtrack that was obviously taken from Waters personal record collection. Link Wray & The Wraymen show up on the track as well as The Coasters and The Trashmen. The soundtrack is actually used to tell the story in this one and it works pretty effectively. The originality of using lyrics from music instead of dialogue makes Mondo Trasho stand out and if for not any other reason, it deserves a watch.
Being such an early film in Waters career this one is not as entertaining as the films to come after but it does offer up some chickens being decapitated by a man in a executioner mask. In another scene Divine meets the virgin Mary. Divine plays most of the movie as a drag queen but also shows up as a greaser with a bad attitude. In one scene Divine is shoplifting some nice women's clothing and even steals a pair a shoes off of a passed out bum. The whole time we think she is stealing the clothes for herself but shes actually stealing them so she can change a corpses clothes in a laundry mat. We also get a strange scene with our main character feeding some chop meat to cockroaches in a park. Then a woman gets hit by a car, leaving her a bloody mess. There is foot/shoe fetishes, A naked man hitchhiking, A nudie female cat fight, A naked flapper chick, some seriously disgusting vomit-fu and a weird surgery scene that involves the removal of human feet with some pigs feet. There is some police brutality and a shoot out with the pigs. The film comes to its climax in a real pig pen on some farm. Gross!

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