Mondo Topless

I am sure the now dead Yugoslavian dictator, Marshall Tito, would have had no objections to me renaming this movie so. Though I do think he himself could have appeared in it: his breasts were larger than some that we see here...

"Mondo Bimbo" has a great mid-60s feel to it, a colourful and vivacious style that is sorely lacking in today's often overly polished, sometimes sterile-looking movies - not to mention breasts that are REAL. (Oh, them da good ol' days that I never lived through...) No implants filled with dead chemical matter, sticking out of very small breasts, trying to escape their captivity, protesting their imprisonment by impersonating badly blown-up balloons; no, not here.

Still, all's not entirely perfect in the world of the 60s dancing harlots. These braindead women need dancing lessons like Paris Hilton needs a lobotomy. In fact, I take that back: I'd much rather have preferred that none of them danced at all. All that motion distracts from what the title tells us this world is really all about (which it is, in a way). Couldn't Russ have told them to keep still just for a single second? Sure, some of them do: some just stare into the camera emptily, grinning like pleased rhinos, but most of them prance around like deranged Elvis impersonators, to the rhythms of often annoying and ear-splitting jazz and blues music.

Someone here wrote that "no-one wants to hear these strippers talk". How wrong he is... After all, this movie would have been too dull with just breasts bouncing left and right. Some of the things Russ's bimbos say are quite amusing. I very much doubt that this stuff was scripted: it just seems so painfully honest, so utterly moronic, hence those must have been genuine thoughts exiting the empty heads of these mostly very pretty women.

And the winner for Movie's Best Pair Of Breasts goes to... the English-looking woman rolling in mud (also the largest pair). At one point she said that "Playboy Magazine" had rejected her because "my bust-line was too big". I always did hate Hugh Heffner; a niveau riche peasant with no sense of what does or doesn't make a woman beautiful. That magazine is strictly for fans of plastic bimbos...

I was very excited to see this movie because of the title but it took me a really long time to find it on DVD. It is quite good and you do get to see quite a lot of female nudity I was really thinking there would be more. With a name like that you would really expect to see lots of breasts all the way through, not just sometimes so I want to write this review to warn people that it's not quite what you might be expecting. However, once you accept this it is pretty funny and not rubbish just not quite what I was hoping for. Also the women look a bit the same, having said that they do have great hair and shoes. Since watching this film I have really got into watching films with girls in high heels so in some ways, though it wasn't quite what it could have been it did open me up to new ways of appreciating the female form.

Russ Meyer directed this mondo film immediately after the commercial disappointment of his now classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Despite being considerably less interesting than that earlier movie, Mondo Topless did far greater business at the box office. It seems pretty obvious to me that this was on account of its no messing high-concept - i.e. The promise of large breasts - and beautiful provocative promo posters. In the event, it is kind of a boring film to watch from start-to-finish unfortunately, but, as you can probably imagine, it still definitely has its individual moments.

Like all Meyer movies, this one has a pretty solid dependency on its female cast and it boasts quite a number of pneumatic girls. The standout for this viewer has to be Babette Bardot (she of the iconic posters), who we see driving her car in glorious twin-peaked profile on several occasions. And it's definitely always a bonus to see Lorna Maitland, who appears in some behind-the-scenes stuff from Lorna. If the film in general was to be broken down into its basic parts it would be dancing, narration and fast edits. The narration combines knowingly over-the-top nonsense from a male narrator and voice-overs from the various strippers about their personal lives, as we watch them bust some moves. Its all underscored too by a particularly relentless soundtrack of garage rock guitar instrumentals. Despite the presence of all these lovely women in states of undress, it does get a bit tedious after a while though, given the overall sameyness of so many of the routines, the high-speed edits taking us from one girl to the next and the relentless soundtrack. Still, it wouldn't be a Meyer film if it didn't look good and this one is no different on that score, with loads of well composed static shots and a constant accent on making the women look great. There's a particularly fabulous shot of one of the girls booging on down, as an incoming train fires towards the camera at speed - its ideas like this that really show Meyer's unique eye in full splendour. So, overall, not the most engaging watch in truth but if you like buxom women and you like to see them photographed really nicely, well, this one is certainly worth a look at least.

Hilarious double-entendre narration (subtle as a sledgehammer) over "mod rock" music. Thoroughly pneumatic cast and hypnotizing choreography.

Mondo Topless (1966)

** (out of 4)

This film starts off as a nutty documentary of San Francisco but quickly turns into a tour of the lovely, big breasted strippers of the city. Thankfully this film runs just 60-minutes because anything longer would have really killed the entertainment factor even with the hour running time pushing its limits. The movie is set up as some sort of documentary but being from Meyer you know very well what it's going to be about. We see countless beautiful and big breasted women dance, jiggle and just bounce their breasts all over the screen and while this is certainly fun to watch, it does grow boring before the half-hour mark. The most interesting (look wise) woman is certainly one called Bouncy Babette Bardot who does a few nice tricks with her you guessed it. I think what really kills the entertainment is that we have these strippers telling us their stories and who in the hell wants to hear them? None of the stories are very interesting and all lean towards the boring side. This certainly isn't a bad movie but the director has much better work out there to be seen.