dhreid

Tod Browning did the world a favor when he made this film. The vast majority of the commentaries here on IMDb attest to the brilliance of this work. When I was around ten years old, over fifty years ago living in Washington, DC, the biggest attraction, other than the Redskins, was when the circus train would come to town. The train would snake thru town past Union Station to settle in the old fair grounds on the banks of the Anacostia river. Elephants, lions, monkeys, midgets and bears - oh my. Children and adults would watch for days as the 'Big Top' rose mightily above the dusty ground,,and then the big day came, the opening of the grand circus.

The Big Top, the sideshows, a feast of sights and sound,,and smells. The Big Top brightened with fantastic acts, beautifully costumed women, men and animals. But to me, the real treat were the sideshows with sword swallowers, bearded ladies and human contorsionists. But to experience the circus and sideshows after dark, well lets just say that surreal was an understatement.

...Now to the subject at hand, Tod Browing's 1932 movie,'Freaks'. The characters in this film were not actors but persons who through twists of fate or misfortune were born 'unnormal'. What makes this presentation even more interesting is to read the biographies of so many of these people, the human torso, the bird lady, the pin heads and more. The film so faithfully depicts the strife of old time circus life, or more accurately sideshow life, that one marvels, often with fretted brow, at the sights presented so boldly on the screen. One cannot help but imagine the lives led by these individuals beyond what is depicted, the sadness, the self pity, the depression yet reveling in their comradery. The thought of 'living a life' as a sideshow freak. This is not a horror only because of the strife of the misfortunates but more by the behavior of the cast who were whole bodied and healthful. True, Browning exploited these individuals but no more so than the exploitation present in scores of sideshows so common in that time in history, when mentally ill and handicapped persons were subject to horrors more terrible than were ever splashed upon the silver screen.

See this classic and reflect upon our own fortune. Today this film would be considered to be outrageously politically incorrect but politics has nothing to do with it. The 'unnaturals' presented here are honest and lovable.

I really cannot understand why this movie was made. At least you get to see some standard 'B' actors such as Jeff Morrow, Morris Ankrum and Mara Corday who is a cute as she can be. Well you guessed it, this thing is about a big bird, what you couldn't have guessed is that it crossed the universe, believe it or not, to build a nest and lay eggs on our 'pale blue dot'(from Carl Sagan). This film has got to win the award for the use of the most stock film shots ever. In more than one sequence, you see folks running in panic in the streets of New York. --Shots taken straight from the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The special effects were not special, the bird was laughable, and there are so many continuity mistakes. I must have missed the transition from Mara thinking Jeff was a real immature jerk to the heavy romance. (??) Never-the-less I watched the movie wishing it would end yet interested enough to want to know how it would end. It seems to me that considering what a menace this bird was supposed to be, that there would be whole raft of scientists and military types trying to figure out how to kill this thing, there weren't, just a handful. Maybe because of the ridiculously low budget. I am glad however to have a copy to add to my 50's B Monster collection. There is no other film in my collection as bad as this one. I loved it!

Now folks this is a really creepy film. Roger Corman has been credited with making some of the worst movies that ever graced the silver screen. Roger, teamed with Francis Ford Coppola, has struck a nerve with this one that has to rank as a classic of the scary flick genre. Patrick Magee, later enjoyed as the wheelchair bound cripple in 'A Clockwork Orange', who plays the family doc, is on to something but does not know exactly what. This is a Hitchcockesque offering done on an extremely low budget yet truly hits the mark. The old mansion/castle, the dark scenes, the ubiquitous dementia, all offered in a black and white cine make this one really eerie. My girlfriend, her brother and I first saw this horror flick on late night TV in DC back in the early '70s and it scared the hell out of us. The first scenes set the stage for the entire film, dark and demented. I would have loved to have seen Barbara Steele, who starred in a few Mario Bava spookies, in this one. See it and try to guess 'who donnit'.