Mr. Mike's Mondo Video - Plot

Plot

Mondo Video was a spoof of the controversial 1962 documentary Mondo Cane, showing people doing weird stunts. The logo for this film copies the original Mondo Cane logo. Also, since Mondo Cane featured the hit song "More," which was initially an instrumental song with words added later, O'Donoghue and writer Emily Prager (who also acted in the film) took the instrumental song "Telstar" by Joe Meek and wrote lyrics for it, to create "The Haunting Theme Song." It was sung by crooner Julius La Rosa, who had also recorded "More." The song is sung in English during the opening credits, and in nonsense Italian over the closing credits.

Many cast members of Saturday Night Live, including Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, Don Novello and Gilda Radner appear. People who had previously hosted SNL, or would go on to host (such as Carrie Fisher, Margot Kidder and Teri Garr) made cameo appearances in this film. Others who appeared in the film include musicians Sid Vicious, Paul Shaffer, Debbie Harry, Root Boy Slim, and Klaus Nomi; and model Patty Oja.

The film is largely plotless; a series of vignettes linked together by interstitial pieces featuring Mr. Mike discussing how upsetting and odd the sequences were. He introduces some of the pieces via voice-over, and some open with no introduction.

Sequences include:

• Aykroyd displaying his webbed toes which he prodded with a screwdriver to prove they were not make-up.
• A church that worships Jack Lord as the one true god (also featuring Dan Aykroyd.)
• A French restaurant that prides itself on how poorly it treats American patrons.
• "Dream Sequence", a series of surreal film pieces bracketed by large light-up signs reading "Dream Sequence" and "End Dream Sequence" that tracked towards and away from the camera. One of these was merely performance footage of Klaus Nomi, while another featured home movie footage shot by Emily Prager intercut with stop-motion animation.
• Short films made by other directors. "Cleavage" by Mitchell Kriegman, was a closeup of a hand working its way out from (what was implied to be) between a large pair of breasts, feeling around gently, realizing where it was, and working its way back in. "Crowd Scene Take One", by Andy Aaron and Ernie Fosselius purported to be a director guiding background actors for a disaster movie scene. "Uncle Si and the Sirens" was an anonymously-directed silent-era "nudie-cutie" short found by SNL alumnus Tom Schiller.
• The presentation of a classified government weapons project, "Laserbra 2000". This piece was the last of a triptych of sequences that chronicled the attempts to obtain the classified footage. In the first, the film (secreted in a violin case) was in fact someone's home movies; in the second, the violin case contained a violin. National Lampoon writer Brian McConnachie appears in the footage as a scientist.