The Movie:

200 Motels is an oddity even within the deliciously weird and wacky career of Frank Zappa. If you're not only a fan of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's music, but a lover of trippy video art, nonsensical alternative humor, and experimental performance videos, you should probably skip this one. Reviewers usually use the term "acquired taste" when writing about narrative-free experimental projects like 200 Motels, but in this case, I don't think there's any taste to be acquired at all. Either you fit the aforementioned criteria and you'll love it as an early foray into irreverent and bats--t crazy alternative comedy and music, or you'll hate it to your very core within the first five minutes and the whole ordeal will be torture.

Shot entirely in a studio ON VIDEO IN 1971 (I can't emphasize this enough. Even though it's technically a feature, do not expect 200 Motels to adhere to the visual standards of features from the era), Zappa's film has a loosely thread theme of the insanity a musician can feel while touring. There are some allusions to real-life problems band members might suffer from while on the road, like getting paid on time (One of the most amusing running jokes is Jimmy Carl Black constantly asking when he'll be paid for the movie they're shooting), having to deal with the boredom of small towns, and trying to avoid manipulative and shrill groupies. Yet by the time we get to Keith Moon as "the hot nun" wrestling with two naked groupies while sobbing about "her" lack of love life, we're firmly in bizarro territory and it's time to stop expecting 200 Motels to make any narrative or thematic sense.

The skits are intercut with musical performances by Zappa and the Mothers. Co-director Tony Palmer, who handled the technical aspects of the production, uses a lot of superimposed images, erratic zooms and camera movements, as well as a median shot length of 0.5 seconds, in order to create a disorienting feeling while the Mothers are performing. This pre-MTV style might be too jarring even for today's audiences who are used to fast cutting in entertainment, I can't even imagine how much it took 1971 audiences out of their comfort zones, which I think might have been the goal in the first place.

The skits are amusing in an Adult-Swim-four-decades-before-Adult-Swim-even-existed kind of way. If you're not into the kind of alternative comedy that mixes in quite a bit of late 60s pop art and early 70 video art, then you'll find them to be obnoxious, overlong, and sometimes downright offensive (The film's misogyny, which was normal in rock culture at the time, is hard to swallow at times). At the very least, 200 Motels is worth checking out only to hear Ringo Starr, who essentially plays Zappa in the film, talk about f---ing a harp-playing girl by sticking a magic lamp into her vagina and rubbing it. There goes whatever wholesome image you concocted in your head about Starr. We're far from the innocence of Yellow Submarine here.

The DVD:

Video:

Since it was shot on video in the early 70s, no amount of HD remastering and DNR will stop 200 Motels from looking like utter garbage. At the risk of sounding facetious, that's also kind of its charm. The film looks like a hellish, drug-induced, and very R-rated version of a variety show from the period, a-la Rowan and Martin. This subversion of TV tropes goes hand in hand with some of Zappa's anti-television views, later heard in songs like "I'm the Slime". The high video score refers to how loyal MGM stuck to the source material, not how good it looks. Any video noise issue you can think of, 200 Motels has it in spades, but it all comes from the source.

Audio:

The disc comes with a Dolby Digital 2.0 track. There's no information about the mix anywhere, but my guess is that we get the film's original mono mix on two channels. The audio is very clear and has a lot of depth, especially during the music performances. One important note: 200 Motels doesn't come with any subtitles, not even closed captioning.

Extras:

We get absolutely nothing.

Final Thoughts:

200 Motels is a willfully insane and nonsensical experience that must have inspired modern alternative comedy like Tim and Eric and The Eric Andre Show. The experimental and absurdist comedy elements are so ahead of their time, we might not have reached there yet even after more than four decades.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com