Following closely to the perversely entertaining Mondo Cane and with a title that roughly translates to “crazy world,” Mondo Balordo is one of the earliest exploitative travelogues to offer shocking glimpses of the misbegotten world of 1964 that was only really brandished about in the nudie-est of men’s magazines.

Hosted by the effortlessly charming Boris Karloff, we’re taken to a large swath of Europe to see sexy transvestite Spaniards on stage, the smoking-hot German lesbian scene, stuffy British bankers dancing like penguins, and Italian strong men throwing fake boulders on a film set — it’s a crazy world!

Meanwhile, in America, women raise money for the pyramids of Luxor by having their own pyramids of flesh judged and rated; an elderly man is married by a lady of the night and is then dumped at an old folks’ home; and a sexualized little person is taken to the abandoned back seat of a car parked in an alley and illicitly made love to — it’s a crazy world!

In India, hungry fisherman pull giant turtles out of the sea and tear them apart flipper to flipper; a little person sings terrible rock ’n’ roll on stage; and some random crooner tries to recapture the success of Cane’s “More” by singing a ballad that rationalizes all that is about to visually scar you in this film — it’s a crazy world!

With terrifying trips to an opium den, a ladies’ balloon-wresting ring and plenty of dirty streets filled with a mix of three-legged dogs and one-legged humans, all directed by Robert Bianchi Montero (of Sexy Nudo fame, of course), Mondo Balordo, like many of the mondo flicks of this era, is an acquired taste of delicate putridity that will willingly seduce any less-traveled pervert after 3 a.m. After all, it’s a crazy world! —Louis Fowler

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As a boy, I would’ve loved to have grown up in a family of naked women, robot monsters, Aztec mummies and masked wrestlers. But I’m not Viviana García-Besné.

In Perdida, whose title translates to “lost,” the filmmaker documents three years of learning about — and then coming to grips with — her grandfather and great uncles’ involvement in arguably some of Mexico’s worst movies ever made. That suspect group includes a subgenre known as “ficheras”: raunchy, cabaret-set comedies featuring voluptuous women in various stages of disrobing. They made a fortune, were branded as “pornography,” and then killed the country’s film industry. Go figure.

Through interviews with surviving family members of the Calderón film dynasty, she attempts to ferret fact from fiction; dusty home movies and handwritten letters help fill in the gaps, as does a third-act raid of a film vault.

From theater owners to full-fledged moviemakers beginning in the 1930s, the Calderón brothers’ story is one of rags to riches to rags. The riches come after the men discover the inherent value of female nudity, both to fill seats and to create controversy to fill more seats. The profits proved as substantial as the bosoms.

The brothers’ crooked, oft-controversial path is paved with acts of monopoly, infidelity and forgery, involving personalities like the revolutionary Pancho Villa, actress Lupe Vélez, mambo king Perez Prado, Fantasy Island’s Ricardo Montalban and the pope.

Unsavory cinema aside, the Calderón name also appeared on many entries in horror, science fiction and just plain bizarre. B-movie enthusiasts are likely to know many of the titles Perdida discusses, from the bargain-basement Aztec Mummy trilogy and 1959’s notorious Santa Claus to a franchise starring the silver-masked luchador Santo.

A high point occurs with García-Besné’s search for a then-lost Calderón film, El Vampiro y El Sexo, aka Santo in the Treasure of Dracula. That’s about as dramatic as Perdida gets; her documentary is personal and lo-fi, so it’s stripped of traditional storytelling structure, but its interest to film buffs — especially those with tastes toward the psychotronic — is undeniable. —Rod Lott

In 1991, in the appropriately named Arizona city of Oracle, eight people thought they were stepping into a massive vivarium for a two-year, 24/7 science project. And they were. But they failed to realize what else they were stepping into: a shitstorm. Known as Biosphere 2, the “prefab paradise,” as dubbed by Diane Sawyer, soon became a magnet for controversy, including allegations of cults and charlatans.

And that’s only part of the story, decades in the making, told by documentarian Matt Wolf (Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project) in Spaceship Earth.

With $250 million backing and inspiration from the sci-fi oddity Silent Running, Biosphere 2 was the dream project of John P. Allen, a nomadic Oklahoma native who took a left-of-left turn after Harvard and assembled a countercultural theater troupe whose members then built themselves a self-sustaining ranch community, and after that, a seafaring research vessel, just because, hey, why not? Honestly, from there, an artificial ecological system doesn’t seem like a stretch.

Aided tremendously by copious home movies capturing seemingly every move of Allen and his crew, Wolf’s can-do New Age tale of wonder and might restores the credibility the brave and bold experiment initially had, until public curiosity beget a media circus, which in turn beget a controversy with no real stakes.

Whatever your stance, Biosphere 2 was a big deal when it opened — and then closed, hermetically speaking — but memories of it have fallen away. (And yet, the mindless comedy it inspired, the Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome — unacknowledged by the doc, for the record — is retroactively regarded as a “classic” by people who clearly saw it too young, before they developed taste.) The only thing more surprising than Spaceship Earth’s Rue McClanahan cameo is that of multishirted serpent Steve Bannon, but every good story needs a villain. —Rod Lott

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