200 Motels

Whatever else it may be, Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels” is a joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process. If there is more that can be done with videotape, I do not want to be there when they do it.

The film is a series of surrealistic sequences allegedly inspired by the experiences of a rock group on the road. The incidents are often outrageously irreverent. The comedy is fast and furious, both sophisticated and sophomoric.

Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]

Thankfully, Zappa was a far better composer than he was a movie director. Whereas the film, with its self-indulgent and incoherent celebrations of drink, drugs and groupies and its tiresomely scatological bent, was largely gale-force gibberish, its sprawling soundtrack, dissonant and atonal but rich in wit and humour, has aged surprisingly well.

With all the mumbo jumbo of necromancy and visual pyrotechnics, there is little real magic, and in the absence of any central organizing presence, the film needs more of Zappa's punctuating wit. [25 Nov 1971, p.79]

200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.

This would be profoundly offensive, if you could tell what was going on. [15 Jun 1992, p.6D]