Mondo Balordo 2004 Horror Movie Review

Want to watch the “macabre, grotesque and thrilling behavior of people in so called real life” narrator Boris Karloff promises at the beginning of MONDO BALORDO?  Want to watch a German dwarf jump, jive and wail on a stage while lip-synching to Louis Prima’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody”?  Want to watch “nubile Asian women wrestling in a bondage fetish club”?  Want to see a smirking Italian tango dancer, who believes he’s the reincarnation of Rudolph Valentino, strut his stuff?  How’s about a peek at the perverse tradition in the German student sword-fighting club?  Cross dressing clubs.  Anyone want to see some cross dressing clubs?  Anyone?

  I don’t know how taboo busting MONDO BALORDO was in 1964, but it’s pretty lame stuff today, interesting only because of Karloff’s narration and a hint at what was considered shocking 40 years ago.  It moves quickly enough, and some of it is pretty bizarre.  Not because the people filmed are strange, but because the film-makers thought they were enough so to include them in the movie.  A curiosity pick-up at best.  Includes a 15-minute bonus track - Dwain Esper’s SINISTER MENACE, a black-and-white film from 1934 that shockingly exploits - er, explores - the shocking issue of drug abuse and smuggling.