Review of Mondo New York

Introduction

Mondo New York is supposed to give us an insight into some of the performance art performed in New York during the 1980s. To do this, it follows an anonymous woman around the city as she wanders from one performance to the next. There is no narration or commentary to this (apart from an opening introduction). The camera simply follows our mystery lady around town and stays long enough to witness each performance.

Video

A pretty shoddy full frame transfer. The worst problem is the large amount of juddering that goes on, almost as if someone has messed up an NTSC->PAL transfer. It`s fair to say that video quality is not brilliant. It does seem that Mondo New York has simply been transferred on to disc with little thought given to cleaning it up and sourcing a good quality master.

Not that this is any real travesty, since you are unlikely to be desperate to see some of the more bizarre images that appear on screen in greater clarity.

Audio

A kind of stereo soundtrack, which sounds like me being vague, probably because it was difficult to hear much stereo. It`s certainly nothing to write home about, with some bits difficult to hear, and also some distortion. Some of the artists perform musical acts, but they were all utterly awful in my opinion. I won`t be rushing out to buy this soundtrack CD.

Features

Absolutely nothing. The menu implies that there might be something, but I couldn`t find anything.

Conclusion

What is the point of Mondo New York? The tagline tells us "This is art, baby!" It would seem that one person`s performance art is another person`s collection of freaks and weirdos who might appear in a Channel 5 type documentary because they do weird things like strip off and cover themselves in eggs and feathers.

This disc has no redeeming features and no point whatsoever. Maybe you could say that it`s a capsule of 1980s performance art, but I don`t know why you would want to put such a thing in a capsule anyway......unless it`s to serve as a reminder about how rubbish it was. As you can tell I was not impressed.

Avoid.