Caged Women II - Gepeinigt und gequält

Barn of the Nekkid Dead - or Nightmare Circus - is a film about a demented young man named Andre who captures women and keeps them chained in the barn. He believes that he is the ringleader of a circus and that they are the trained animals in his act. Andre is a psychopath, but it's not all his fault - his mother left him when he was very young and his father has turned into a murderous radioactive mutant. Andre crushes rebellion among his animals by feeding would-be rebels to his pet mountain lion or to his father.

The obvious moral of the story would be that men treat women horribly, be it is more likely that the pretense of the moral is an excuse to show attractive young women chained and whipped. The best part of this movie is the ending. Help is on the way in the background from the beginning but by the time it arrives at the barn, Andre's father has killed almost everyone. It's refreshing to watch a film without a morally happy ending.

After their car breaks down in the desert, Simone (Manuela Thiess) and her two friends encounter a helpful man named Andre (Andrew Prine), who takes them back to his place. Actually, he takes them to his barn, where Simone and company meet the other women. This is when they realize that Andre is utterly insane. He's an ex-circus performer with some serious issues!

The rest is a tale of degradation and doom, while the tortured trio's manager and the local sheriff attempt to locate them. Meanwhile, a marauding monster roams the desert, killing the unwary.

As weird movies go, this is in the upper echelon. Part PSYCHO, part TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and all bonkers, it's certainly one of a kind! The frustrating finale is one for the ages!...

The woefully underrated Andrew Prine struts through this lousy but shamefully likable mess with a casual and unaffected "yeah, but at least I'm working" charisma. In BARN OF THE NAKED DEAD aka NIGHTMARE CIRCUS, he portrays a mother-fixated psychotic who keeps a private zoo of captive women at an off-road Nevada desert property...a ruinous, weather-beaten old ranch in precarious proximity to a government nuclear testing site . The girls are a stock of resistant performers used in Prine's sadistic circus-themed psychodramas, and if that's not weird enough to win you over, there's also a radioactive mutant and a hungry black panther added to the cuckoo mix.

As addle-brained 70s shockers go, this can be pretty enjoyable if expressly accepted as the unrefined trash that it is. The overwhelming dearth of professionalism will likely be met with disapproval from a mainstream viewership, but trash-curious types and those of lax standards should find it quite embraceable.

5.5/10

While I saw this movie under the title of "Barn of the Naked Dead", I feel that the title "Nightmare Circus" is just as bad. There is no barn, there is no circus, there is no naked, and I only recall one person dying in the movie and I don't believe it ever shows them dead either. This film is devoid of any content at all. There isn't even enough in to to MST3K it. Avoid it..

let's see. there is a barn, people do die, and no, the dead don't walk around naked. infact, there's no nudity in the film. at least there wasn't in the video copy that i had. i just remember andrew prine keeping girls in a barn, and some creature going around killing.