Mondo Topless

I couldn't help but laugh out loud while watching MONDO TOPLESS. The overexuberant descriptive narration along with the busty women's epileptic dancing gave the movie a kind of surreal, comical effect. Visually, there are some stunning shots (the woman dancing next to the incoming train) and the wacky yet clever narration parodies everything about the late 60s, 70s sexual revolution. So, clearly, Russ Meyer ain't no idiot. There's a method to his madness. But the movie gets a bit boring after a while. And many of the women look odd, due mainly to the dated hair styles and attitude. But it's worth a look just for the oddity of it all.

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...

'Mondo Topless' is Russ Meyer's pseudo documentary that starts out with snapshots from San Fransisco with narrator (John Furlong) praises the city's progress. Images of San Fransisco is cleverly cut with seemingly unnecessary shots of topless woman driving the car. It doesn't take long when the film turns its focus on different strippers dancing and their recorded conversations about their thoughts and troubles.

'Mondo Topless' is visually beautiful film (in here I don't mean the nudity, but cinematography) with many interesting shots. Almost monotonous monologues of strippers over the groovy pop-rock and girls dancing gives the film quite surreal feel. The humor is subtle as left hook from Mike Tyson. The film keeps its tone and rhythm all the 60 minutes, and by the last quarter, it starts to get little bit boring.

Russ Meyer is much more talented and smarter than many think based on his films, and 'Mondo Topless' proves his intelligence besides the love of big bosoms.

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

This is another great put on movie by Russ Meyer. Nobody but nobody makes a film like Russ Meyer although I am sure many have tried but nobody even comes close to combining all the elements so skillfully as Russ did in his movies.

Almost all of Russ Meyer's movies are put ons. I am sure Russ intended them just that way. It was his idea of winking at his audience which probably are mostly men. But the true fact is that Meyer's movies not only made women objects of desire and physically awesome and intimidating but in comparison to the men in his movies were far more intelligent than the men in them, and this was something Russ did long before anyone ever heard of the women's movement.