Please don't spend money on this.

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Second only to Yellow Submarine in the genre of films designed to be watched on Hallucinogens. This movie opens with an operatic ode to the most seemingly insignificant of objects, a roach. Like a roller coaster lifting the audience, By the end of the song we sense we have stepped out of the normal into an unbound canvas. Conceptually outdoing the Beatles, the focus is internal and personal. Lonely band members futile attempts to avoid insanity and find love on the road. Masked as a series of situations of the rock band on the road, Zappa succeeds in twisting your mind with conceptual oddities. By the end of the film the actors are apologizing to the audience for wringing out their brains. All offering the same excuse. Zappa made them do it. This film is well worth your time. i know many more than myself who have seen it way more than twice. I can't wait til Tim Burton and Johnny Depp remake it with a budget.

Apparently a lot of people think that this movie shows what it is like to take LSD. If so, I'm sure glad I never dropped any acid, because then I would have been bored.Alternatively, some people say that this is the movie to watch while you are tripping out on acid. Well, if you have to watch a movie like this to enjoy being on LSD, it's not worth it.Speaking of drugs, if you have ever been around some people who are drunk or on drugs and think that everything they say or do is just hilarious, then you know what it is like to watch this movie. The problem is not that the potty-mouth humor is not funny, which would be bad enough, but that the people in the movie obviously think they are being so cute and clever and witty, and that makes the movie especially irritating.

Tony Palmer Films has reissued 200 MOTELS on DVD in "restored" form, with an interesting audio commentary from Tony that expands on how the film was produced and dispels some of the film's long standing rumors (ex: "the master tapes were destroyed" - Tony claims he still has them intact.).Unfortunately, the film print used, while having decent color, suffers from restoration artifacts and is often dirty and scratched (why the video tapes themselves were not used to make a new print is unknown). The 2 channel mono audio's muddy and occasionally drops out on one side or the other. Occasional splices obliterate short sections of the film, including Ringo Starr's description of how he, as "Larry the Dwarf", attracts women.Definitely worthwhile for Frank's fans who will again have access to this relatively obscure work.

I've been a fan since 1974 and had the fortune of obtaining the original Mothers albums CHEAP -as MGM/Verve was deleting them from its catalog. Then I caught up on the Warner Brothers albums and was never enamoured with the 'Flo & Eddie' period. Still I caught 200 Motels at one of those 99 cent midnight movies that were popular back then. Everyone in the audience looked a lot like the people up on the screen and when it was over it made me think that "Flower Power" may have been a myth after all; in a way I think the experience made me appreciate and/or pity those Mothers working under such grueling conditions. The 'story'appears to make the members of the Mothers look like sexist pigs in the pre-feminist era of 1971. Mostly they behave pathetic and predatory. As Frank stated in "The True Story of 200 Motels" its easier to get guys to essentially play themselves, which makes it remarkable that they all go along with it. Some of you may recall Jeff Simmons quit the group when he saw the lines he was supposed to deliver, which turned out to be self-fulfilling prophesy!