The summer of 1989 found a commercial in heavy rotation on the local “alternative” radio station. WFNX was playing the bejeezus out of a spot for a movie called “Mondo New York.” It started out as a backbeat-heavy thing, interspersed with quotes from the film, but then a very familiar riff came roaring out. “Holy Cow – is that the DICTATORS??” was my reaction the first time I heard it. Close enough, it was actually the debut recording on Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, with an un-credited RTB on lead, blasting their way through “New York, New York.”
The very cool radio spot played incessantly for 2 weeks, leading up to the movie’s debut weekend. Which, by the way, was also its closing weekend. The reviews for the film were uniformly savage, with “pointless, pretentious, and puerile” being my favorite, and pretty much chased the flick out of town and into oblivion, where it’s remained for the last 20 or so years. Rumors of the film containing some footage of our boys went unconfirmed.
I recently saw a VHS copy on Amazon, and thought to myself, “Well, the reviews were terrible, and the soundtrack LP was worthless. But the commercial was great, so surely the film it came from has to have some small degree of merit, right? Right?” Well, $20 later, I’m here to tell you that MNY is every bit as putrid as the critics said it was.
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