Mondo Trasho

Mondo Trasho (1969)

At Last... A "Gutter Film"

A day in the lives of a hit-and-run driver and her victim, and the bizarre things that happen to them before and after they collide (sexual assault by a crazed foot-fetishist, visions of the Virgin Mary, strange chicken-foot grafting operations).

Date of release
1969-03-14
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (41)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Comedy
Director
John Waters

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Baltimore

Mondo Trasho is a 1969 American 16mm mondo black comedy film by John Waters. The film stars Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary and Mink Stole. It contains very little dialogue, the story being told mostly through musical cues.

Production

Depending on versions of the story; either Waters or the whole crew (except Divine) was either arrested or nearly arrested during production for illegally shooting a scene involving a nude hitchhiker on the campus of Johns Hopkins University. However, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, only one person was immediately arrested, actor Mark P. Isherwood. Charged sometime later were John Waters, Nancy Stoll, David C. Lochary and Mary V.

The film's title refers to a series of semi-related quasi-documentary films that were popular during the 1960s: Mondo Cane, Mondo Freudo, Mondo Bizarro, etc. The title also pays tribute to Mondo Topless, a film by one of Waters's favorite directors, Russ Meyer.

Waters, in a 2008 interview, stated that the songs used in the film were taken right out of his own record collection. Waters says he did not pay the proper licensing fees to use these songs because he could not afford to. It is because of this, Waters says, that Mondo Trasho remains out of distribution, as the still-unsecured music rights would be too prohibitively expensive to clear.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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