Nightmare Circus

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.

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.

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..

Well, I actually thought that this film would be about zombies, but instead the lacklustre plot follows a deranged young man who keeps women locked up in his barn in order to use them for some kind of circus trick. The film is yet another entry in the already full to the brim seventies exploitation cannon, and while a lot of these sorts of films are very good - this one has very little going for it. The film is, frankly, boring, and since the plot has very little in the way of originality; this film makes for very miserable viewing because you know that nothing is going to come of it. There's another sub-plot involving the young man's father who has been mutated by radiation. This is potentially interesting, but it's not handled well at all and not even that manages to change the tedium of the rest of the film. The acting is horrible as well, and director Alan Rudolph isn't able to get anything out of his cast. Films like this really need to be rather 'nasty' to succeed, and that's one of the most annoying things about this film; it all feels very tame, and therefore its pointless watching. Overall, Barn of the Naked Dead is a film that fully deserves its terrible reputation, and I recommend not watching it.

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