200 Motels DVD – Review by SOTCAA

Frank Zappa’s 1971 big-screen venture 200 Motels has not been particularly well-preserved on VHS over the years. Although there have been several releases and re-releases, these have tended to be sourced from the same slightly iffy video masters with no attempts at any kind of upgrade.

The first ever (official) DVD release of the film last month on the Voiceprint label should have been the perfect opportunity to rectify this. Sadly, this release – overseen and ‘restored’ by original co-director Tony Palmer – stands out as not only the worst edition of the film ever commercially released but could actually hold the honour of being the worst DVD ever compiled. (…)

It looks like shit.

Full – very very detailed – article here (see our previous post about the DVD!) Just one side-note: on the official site of the DVD one will find where the trailer should be: “This video is no longer available because of copyright reasons – belonging to  Metro-Goldwin-Mayer”.
(Sorry, the latter had to be translated back to English from Hungarian… I’m not sure whether it’s perfect, but you’ll understand anyway.)

Zappa, Frank – 200 Motels DVD

As mentioned in the comments by LA Guru, heeeere’s Zappa’s 200 Motels:

Released on DVD for the first time, by original director Tony Palmer, is this flawed masterpiece of circa 1970 Frank Zappa craziness. Obviously shot in a very short time on a very low budget, some of this drags, but some of it is really funny and/or spot-on; I still see the ‘re-education camp for musicians’ sequence in my dreams

Previously.