Blood Circus

I affectionately call it "The Worst Movie ever made".

I ran a test print for Mr. Rigatuso, or Bob Harris as he is known. I was a projectionist at the time. He was very excited about the movie and paid the theater to run the movie while the theatre was closed.

I managed to sit through the whole thing. It had no recognizable plot and starred his friends and family. It made very little sense and scenes and characters were injected for no apparent reason.

The most bizarre thing though, was the credits. Inexplicibly they rolled over a large baby photo of one of his kids. The music playing was written by another family member and had the refrain, "Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day". Huh?

Aliens disguised as wrestlers cause a ruckus in this rare treat of a film. I don't call this film a rare treat because it was any good, I call it a rare treat because I must be one of the few people who actually paid to see it in its four-walled theatrical run at the Patterson theater in Baltimore, Maryland. While the film was in production, I saw TV commercials enticing people to pay to go to the Civic Center to watch the excitement of them filming the wrestling scenes. Those who have been on a set know that the "excitement" of watching someone filming a movie lasts only a few minutes. I wasn't there, but I heard the crowd got quite irate! Needless to say, I was anxious to see the film when it came out. I thought it would be bad, and it didn't disappoint. Sadly, it was a little too bad. So bad, in fact, that it was one of the very few films I walked out of at a theater. I think the other two were Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo," which was bad in a whole different way, and the X-Rated "Blonde Emmanuele in 3-D." (I'm a 3-D fan, but I didn't need to see THAT coming at me!)

Despite its ineptness, I would like to see this film again. With the tons of material flooding the DVD market, one would hope this would find a distributor. Fans of campy bad movies would definitely enjoy it.

I remember getting cheap "Santo Gold" medallions instead of pay for doing this movie. My friends and I were hammered that night, but as I remember, there were some great freeze frames of me and my buddies at the end of the movie. My dead friend Stoc Marcut is the last frame of the movie.

The "Santo" guy had cheap infomercials at 3am on channel 45. We all made fun of this guy, so he was kind of a cult hero and was honored to be in this POS movie!

When I was in boot camp in FT Benning, Georgia, I was pulling CQ duty and was watching local TV. I almost went AWOL when I saw the trailer. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Stoc's face in a freeze frames. Priceless!

Anyone with a copy of this movie please get in touch with me. I want a copy!

I was actually one of those curious enough to become an extra in the filming of the movie, "Blood Circus," when it was shot at the Baltimore Civic Center (now called the Baltimore Arena. . . and I wonder whether the venue changed its name because it wanted to distance itself from this horrible creation). I played myself, a photographer, who stood ringside to act as a photographer during the fight sequence. If I recall, the people became very upset as the filming unfolded.

The filming was not at all done with any thought-out planning. The producer kept promising things for the audience, but the rate of filming was so snail-paced and uncoordinated that the "audience" - made of people who came based on promises of some good things - didn't get what they thought they were promised. I couldn't have cared less, because I just wanted my face in a movie, no matter how good or bad.

I was present at the "World Premiere" at the Patterson Theater, and I couldn't believe just how pathetic a finished film could have been. I remember that I actually was one of the few who remained, after most of the paying customers had walked out in anger. Even "Plan Nine From Outer Space" had a level of entertainment. Maybe not "Glitter," but that film was even better than "Blood Circus." But I still would like to get my hands on a copy of the movie. I wish that someday someone would make a copy available. No matter how poorly a film might have been created, it still seals a moment in time.