Freakshow

What can be said about a film where narrative form, editing and reality are totally foreign concepts. You may watch this film stone cold sober, but by the end you will feel as though your mind is jelly and that jelly is a appetizing treat that many a dwarfish freak would eat. Cue padded wallpaper.

This is allegedly a group of short stories, but no one seemed to mention to the writer that stories need endings, and if your going to film a ten minute James Bondesque strip sequence with ten very eighties looking woman they have to get their tits out! However, despite all it's insanity and pure weirdness it is in fact a throughly entertaining film with belly laughs throughout.

"Society"

"Freakshow" is an anthology horror movie.It opens with surprisingly violent and unsettling mass murder massacre of late night show cinema patrons that reminded me current case of Dark Knight Rising massacre gunman James Eagan Holmes.All this carnage is recorded by bitchy news reporter Shannon Nichols and her cameraman.Four horror stories are told her by the proprietor of bizarre museum/exhibition.The first one involves luckless junkie and scared poodle,the second one has pizza delivery guy,haunted mansion and a lot of lingerie,the third one is about paralyzed but not dead woman and the final story has two greedy gravediggers,rich widow plus some cheesy zombies.Cheap production values,bad acting and nasty beginning-welcome to surprisingly enjoyable and entertaining "Freakshow".7 horror stories out of 10.

Freakshow. Sounds a bit like Creepshow. And, surprise, surprise, it's a horror anthology. But it's nowhere near as good as Creepshow. The stories are poorly constructed, the direction is weak, and the acting barely passable. Most of the budget seems to have gone on lingerie and lasers (or, more likely, the budget was too low to hire lasers and the owner loaned them to the movie in exchange for a credit). Perhaps they should have called it Cheapshow.

The film starts with a Twilight Zone-style voiceover from a bargain basement Burgess Meredith soundalike, after which the wraparound story begins: ambitious news anchor Shan (Audrey Landers) walks home after reporting on a movie theatre massacre, stopping to use the telephone at a bizarre museum where the owner proceeds to show her the exhibits, each of which tells a chilling story.

Tale one sees a desperate junkie Fidge (Dean Richards Wiancko) denied his next fix when a poodle runs away with his bag of dope. The second story revolves around a pizza delivery boy who bets his work colleagues that he can successfully deliver an order to a cursed house. Chapter three sees a young woman mistakenly declared dead after a recreational drug leaves her paralysed. And the final story features a pair of entrepreneurial gravediggers who sell cemetery soil to a golf club, upsetting the dead in the process.

As with many a late '80s horror, logic doesn't come into play that much, especially in the second tale, which inexplicably turns into a music video halfway through, with numerous hot women in sexy underwear performing dance moves to a bad rock song. None of the stories have very satisfying conclusions. As anthologies go, this is a pretty poor collection, and as such it is only likely to appeal to avid fans of the subgenre or those who can't get enough of offbeat low budget trash.

I see so many brutal reviews on this 80"s horror anthology film and it makes me smile. Reviewers seem to think it is trying to be Citizen Kane or even Creepshow. If you go into this movie expecting cinematic greatness you will not find it. However, If you are looking for a fun anthology that does not take itself that seriously and lays on a healthy portion of 80"s cheese and the offbeat feel to all things 80's then you will have some fun. We are treated to some really shaky acting and just passable affects to 80's hair metal video vixens busting out into an all out rock video while dancing in their panties before they sacrifice a pizza delivery guy who lets just say, turns the tables. Add drug stealing poodles, hard partying zombies and a gigolo named Funk and I mean what else could a true film historian want. Just grab some popcorn and turn off your brain and enjoy a stroll to a simpler time, if only for an hour and a half.

My review was written in May 1989 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Freakshow" is a rock-bottom horror film that only a tax loss specialist could love, Prospects are rotten in all media.

Amateurishly directed and acted opus consists of four horror stories, linked by the flimsy premise of loathsome tv newscaster Audrey Landers trapped in a curiosity collection exhibit by its goofball curator Peter Read.

Tales, wholly lacking in awe or ingenuity, go from bad to worse: an endlessly padded episode of a drug addict lured to his death by a poodle with a bag of heroin in its mouth; a pizza delivery boy who survives a night at an evil mansion located at 1313 Bram Stoker Blvd.; a ripoff of a classic "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to episode in which a paralyzed girl (from drugs again) is subjected to an autopsy while still alive and conscious; and a stupid story of ghouls rising from their graves to punish two gravediggers who are stealing the dirt from the cemetery to sell it to a golf course (!).

Level of tastelessness here is evidenced in the final segment when a goon finds out the dead and come back, and exults: "That's great! That means there'll be a Beatles reunion".

Director Constantino Magnatta embarrassingly tries to simulate music videos, with terrible rock songs frequently thrown in and girls sashaying in their underwear (one couldn't call it dancing). Heavy-handed use of spiral patterns to try and hypnotize the audience plu bookended setting of the pic in a movie theater doesn't work.