Made in 1975, John Lamond’s debut feature is a late entry into the Mondo movie genre, aping 1962’s Mondo Cane – or perhaps more accurately, the sex and shocks of other mid Seventies entry into the genre like This Is America. Unfortunately, Lamond’s film lacks both the jaundiced view of filmmakers looking at another country – the thing that made This Is America and similar films so entertaining – and is far too dull to compete with even mid-level Mondo.

Lamond follows the Mondo Cane structure of sex, shocks and sadism, flitting from the lightweight to the serious, the raunchy to the fluffy, as his cameras roam around Australia looking for oddities and nudity. Much of this is overly familiar to the Mondo enthusiast – body painting, BDSM clubs, massage parlours, ‘exotic’ food (in this case, grubs and snakes), Satanist and strippers. The sobering part comes from a look at aborigines struggling with alcoholism and lack of purpose, though the sequence lacks the genuine indignation found in the best Mondo films – ironic, given how close to home this problem was to the filmmakers.

The film really needs some editing – there’s a lengthy gay marriage ceremony, which might have seemed sensational in 1975, but even then didn’t need showing in its entirety, and equally dull sequences covering Australia’s obsession with gambling and beer, and UFO fanatics. These might be suitable subjects for a less sensationalist film, but here, they simply cause the movie to grind to a crashing halt. A lengthy sequence with godawful performance artist/comedian/cock Count Copernicus will also test your patience.

There is, at least, a copious amount of nudity, as the film visits nude beaches and looks at ‘food sex’, porno film production and assorted types of erotic art in a sterling effort to cram as much bare flesh as possible into the proceedings. There’s rarely more than about five minutes of footage without a naked girl, and the film ends with an underwater sequence showing Gina Allen snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef – an attempt to wrap things up that doesn’t quite give the film the philosophical ending that the best Mondo films manage so effortlessly.

In the end, Lamond’s film is a good attempt at copying the Mondo film style, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. The pacing, the content, the narration and the music fail to create a sense of being taken on a journey that the best films in the genre have. Instead, it seems to be clutching at straws. Perhaps Australia just wasn’t that exciting a place in the mid-70s.

Mondo completists will, of course, want to see it – it’s shameful how few of the classic films of the genre are out on DVD, so every hole’s a goal so to speak. But this is strictly second division stuff, and anyone expecting something like 1970s Mondo classics such as Savage Man, Savage Beast or This Violent World will be very disappointed.

DAVID FLINT

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