Mondo Teeno (1967)

Mondo,

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"Across the country, every Friday and Saturday night, they gather in the temples to perform ceremonial dances to a rhythm that seems to reach back in time. It's called the beat." A quickie documentary, originally paired on a drive-in double bill with "Mondo Mod," claims to provide the lowdown on crazy teenage goings-on around the globe. We are shown glimpses of the Los Angeles Sunset Strip teen riots, The Paris student revolt, and the English mods and rockers running wild in Brighton. Things soon wind down to such critical issues of the day as go-go dancing, striped hip huggers, bikers, and surfing, all of which are seen to have worldwide popularity.

Towards the late-60's, a new breed of "rebellious teens" had supposedly emerged and as a result lot of great, fun movies were released on the exploitation circuit to give warning to "teenagers and straight people alike". Some of these gems include MONDO MOD, MALAMONDO and HIPPIE REVOLT. TEENAGE REBELLION is one of these films but in my eyes it is something of an individual. For one thing it's in black-and-white, has nothing to do with hippies and rather than just sticking to good ol' USA, we get to see rebellious teens from a whole lot of other parts of the world (mostly Europe).

There's never a moment of boredom as Burt Topper's serious narration informs us about teenage protests, revolts, prostitution, drugs and unwed mothers. There are lots of memorable (sometimes staged) scenes involving LSD, beatnik parties, young homosexuals in Italy, an interview with a British prostitute and a wonderful, surprising clay-animated scene depicting man's discovery of the wheel (great editing, too!). The groovy dancing scenes (from US, London and even Tokyo) and music (Mike Curb produced the Sidewalk lable soundtrack!) are unnecessarily picked on by Topper's narration and stills of old folks walking in the street with phony voice-overs ("Call that dancing? We had real dancing in my day!"). The flashbacks with people jitterbugging and dead movie stars walking across Sunset Blvd. represent how time has changed since then.

TEENAGE REBELLION usually played under the title MONDO TEENO (!) and was released several times during the late-60's and early-70's. One time it even played with H.G. Lewis' JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT! My video copy is from Something Weird who sadly had their copy deleted some time ago making it completely unavailable. If you dig this sort of 60's thing, you should definitely look it up because films like these are like nostalgic tours of and era which will never again be experienced.