MOVIE REVIEW : Way Down, Way Out in ‘Mondo New York’

In carnival parlance, the geek was the guy--usually a hopeless alcoholic--who bit the heads off live chickens for the jaded clientele. Supposedly, this act symbolizes the lowest level to which you can sink in show business.

But, in “Mondo New York” (selected theaters), performance artist and painter Joe Coleman appears to try to sink lower. He comes on stage, rants, pulls out two live white mice and bites off their heads--right before setting off the fireworks attached to his chest.

That’s an act you don’t want to follow. That’s an act you don’t want to precede. That’s an act you don’t want to see .

Yet it’s clear the impresarios of this repulsive movie--producer Stuart S. Shapiro and writer-director Harvey Keith--think they’re onto something hot. Later on, somebody does bite off the head of a live chicken, during a brief voodoo ceremony. And we’re also shown an unidentified AIDS victim injecting himself with heroin, a frowzy S & M club, a cockfight and what’s supposed to be a slave auction in Chinatown.

What passes for a narrative hook here is an exciting, disgusting day and night on New York’s Lower East Side as experienced by a young, angelic-looking blond woman (Shannah Laumeister). She wanders around silently, and--in between the sleazy stuff on the streets--catches a dozen or so of the area’s performance artists: including Ann Magnuson, Karen Finley (whose controversial yam sessions inspired a wild brouhaha at the Village Voice and who here douses herself with egg yolks and sequins while railing against East Side gentrification), Pheobe Legere, street comics Charlie Barnett and Rick Aviles and John Sex and His Bodacious Ta-Tas. Magnuson actually beats a dead horse during her act. But it’s a stuffed horse; mercifully, no one runs on camera to bite it.

In this parade of gross-outs, Laumeister is used as a thread, or a come-on, or maybe even a moral reference point. When something gets especially rough, she purses her lips and goes, “Icky!”

Icky is right. To call this movie trash doesn’t do it justice.

Shapiro and Keith are presumably showing us the off-the-edge culture of the East and Greenwich Village areas. Yet, they seem to have skittish tourist sensibilities themselves. It’s not surprising they pick an 18-year-old woman saying “Icky” as a reference point; that’s about the way they respond too.

“Mondo New York” (Times- rated Adult for offensive language and repulsive situations) has some small value as an uncensored record of these highly regarded and controversial performance artists. But, mostly, it’s a movie which expects us to react like the bored voyeurs eyeballing the geek while the blood spurts from his teeth.