If nothing else, the
rotten horror picture Carnival of Blood has one of the strangest opening salvos you’ll ever encounter. Dialogue
scenes featuring two equally unpleasant couples are intercut with the peculiar
image of a woman’s head emerging through a hole in some sort of velvet table
cover. While a song plays on the soundtrack and credits appear, the woman recites
dialogue that isn’t heard. The onslaught concludes with a quick shot of someone
else’s head getting chopped in half with a cleaver. Say what? Once the story
kicks in, it doesn’t make much more sense than the credits sequence. While a
murder spree unfolds on the Coney Island boardwalk, ambitious assistant
district attorney Dan (Martin Barolsky) enlists his fiancée, Laura (Judith
Resnick), to act as bait for the killer so he can make his career by solving
the case. Because, as we all know, DA’s and homicide detectives have exactly
the same job. As the confusing and turgid Dan/Laura storyline plays out,
incompetent writer-director Leonard Kirtman also shows the goings-on at a
particular Coney Island carnival booth, where unassuming Tom (Earle Edgerton) works
alongside his deformed and mentally underdeveloped assistant, Gimpy (played by
future Rocky costar Burt
Young, billed here as “John Harris”). The movie shifts awkwardly between the
investigation, cheaply rendered gore scenes (lots of plucking entrails from
victims’ bodies), and tiresome vignettes set at the booth, where Tom and Gimpy
serve odious customers like the woman who demands free throws and unearned
prizes. A good half of this wretched movie is out of focus and/or underexposed,
and even the material that’s photographed correctly is boring or distasteful or
both. At times, the flick nears that special so-bad-it’s-good place, simply
because every single aspect of Carnival
of Blood is pathetic. But if the best a movie can offer is Burt Young
wearing tacky makeup and acting like a violent imbecile, how good can the
experience get, whether taken ironically or straight?
Carnival of Blood: SQUARE
It had to have been awkward to visit any given carnival in the late 60's and early 70's and always have to push your way through a bunch of B-Movie film crews all shooting their crappy films there. Seems like you couldn't even buy a funnel cake or get to a Port-A-John without having to first negotiate your way through dense clusters of cameramen, boom operators, and atrociously bad actors and actresses all trying their best.
ReplyDeleteI bring this up because the number of terrible films I've seen that were set at perfectly ordinary fun-fairs is very weirdly huge; half of the time the setting is incidental to the actual plot.