Review of Mondo Trasho

Mondo Trasho, the legendary John Waters' debut film, is rife with pacing issues, ugly camera-work, and all around monotony from beginning to end. The ugliness of the film overall is unsurprising, as this is Waters' lowest budget ever at $2,100, about $13,000 today. However, understandable as some of the films' problems may be, it is still mostly a chore to sit through. Still experimenting with forms of storytelling, Waters dug through his record collection to populate nearly the entire film with a collection of 50s and 60s pop music, opting out of traditional dialogue to essentially make a bizarre, trashy silent film with very few sequences of actual speech (3, by my count, each lasting less than two minutes in this 86 minute film). There are a few sequences in which this strange approach to the storytelling actually does convey it well. For example, early on in the film the nameless character played by Mary Vivian Pearce is being stalked by Danny Mills' also nameless foot fetishist, and through cutting between them sets contrasting moods with their two soundtracks. This technique is the main way in which this method of storytelling is put to actually creative use; to juxtapose two different characters' emotional states and set a tone. However, unfortunately it seems that this was Waters' only coherent idea with the project; most of the time the music seems as meandering as the drawn out sequences, which are often drained completely of any initial humor after minutes and minutes of seeing a single bizarre scenario on screen. There are about three thoroughly enjoyable sequences in the entire film that point towards what Waters would later become capable of: Divine's introductory scene, the scene involved Dr. Coathanger, and the final three minutes of the film. These scenes, the last of which contains one of the only instances of dialogue in the entire film, manage to capture the trashy, often perverse and transgressive humor of Waters in genuinely interesting ways, but could not be stretched to feature length. The fact of the matter is that in Waters' infancy as a filmmaker he manages to pull together some interesting ideas and an intriguing mode of storytelling, but sadly comes up short on nearly all fronts due to overlong scenes and repetitive sequences.