Here’s a jaw-dropping slice of homegrown, regional,
low-budget ‘70s hokum. Your jaw won’t
drop because it’s particularly gruesome or scary or anything. It’ll drop because of how cheap (and bad) it
is.
The idea is sound.
Who wouldn’t want to see random people getting bumped off in a carnival setting? Too bad the production values are so poor
that even the simplest of scenes are awfully unconvincing.
For starters, there’s hardly anyone ever at the carnival. At all times it looks like it was filmed at a
carnival after closing time with background extras being precious and few. When someone finally does get killed, they aren’t
even missed, which doesn’t help to generate suspense. There is one potentially great scene where a
guy is decapitated on a rollercoaster, but the effects are so shoddy, and the
editing is so haphazard that the payoff is basically ruined.
Speaking of editing, the whole movie feels slightly
off-kilter because of the way it’s assembled.
Scenes come and go with little bearing on what happened before. Often,
the film is choppy and incoherent. In
other places it feels unfinished, almost as if it was cobbled together after
the fact. Because of that, it feels much
longer than the seventy-three-minute running time suggests.
The subplot about the horde of cannibals that lurk below the
carnival works the best. The scenes of
the cannibals attacking their victims owe a great debt to Night of the Living
Dead. While we’re on the subject of
public domain films, I must point out that I did like the part where the
cannibals all hang out and watch Lon Chaney movies.
The acting is painfully amateurish at times. The only name star in the cast is Herve
Villechaize, who has a small role (no pun intended) as a carny. He’s far and away the best actor in the film,
which really isn’t saying much.
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