Mondo Hollywoodland
An eyeful, but what else?
by Richard von Busack
Janek Ambrose, a long-time producer and director, worked hard on his indie midnight-movie Mondo Hollywoodland, which is now on Apple and Amazon Prime. It’s inadvisable to watch it without drugs. Ambrose has an eye for montage and the psychedelic sequence in LSD-era cinema, as well as a taste for music from the old weird America. In the video babble in the background are relics such the anti-commie documentary “America: The Challenge We Face.” Among Ambrose’s gifts are an ebullient and energetic feel for the lightness of LA, for the Robert Altman-style people-collage of exasperated women and child-like men.
Among Ambrose’s enthusiasms is a taste for that 60 year old cycle of forbidden-expose films that commenced with the 1962 Mondo Cane (“Dog’s World”). This sort-of documentary sired films that were at their best in satire: John Waters’ Mondo Trasho, Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless, and Mr. Mike [O’Donoghue’s] Mondo Video. Students of the shock genre expand the list of mondo movies to include the grimmer “Faces of Death” documentaries prized by nihilist adolescents.
Like his predecessors, Ambrose is not above using staged episodes to convince an audience — here it is, we’ve pulled back the veil, this is the real thing. Don’t turn away! At the beginning, an increasingly peremptory English narrator — who at one point claims to be an interdimensional being —seeks the essence this stew of humanity, the real Hollywood. Thus he’s also seeking the meaning of words in a town where words have no meaning.
Killing animals on camera was sometimes part of this mini-genre. In a small way, Ambrose follows suit, in passages of a Los Angeles goof named Normand Boyle (Chris Blim) who tries to take care of the rats in his walls by plugging a hose into his tail pipe of his car and monoxiding them.
Ambrose proposes a taxonomy of three different Hollywood types: Titans, Weirdoes and Dreamers. Aren’t the second two sort of aligned? The results have the off-again, on-again quality of sketch comedy that isn’t really funny. The “weirdoes” include a group of feuding rebels, one who wants to tell a tale of how he was in the San Francisco Mission district in the 1960s with Bill Ayers and Noam Chomsky, as well as dyed, poolside gaga chicks with that quacky, vocal-fry laden SoCal accent. Among the semi-identified characters is one such “Titan,” an aggrieved Instagram superstar, getting pissed off at a producer who wants to make a movie about a blind painter: “‘Flash that pretty smile’? This is my life!…I shit money!” In the last third is a little pathos, the dashing of the hopes of a sweet aspiring actress (Jessica Jade Andreas) who lives in what seems to be Highland Park with her tabby kitten.
The barrage of images is a real eyeful — especially in the dayglo solarized ‘shrooms sequences shot during a protest in downtown LA. But Ambrose has the usual problem of someone trying to film an elusive vibe. He’s so drenched in the ‘sixties aesthetic that you wish there was a Roger Corman who could take all this talent and energy and plug it into a story.
