Nightmare Circus

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!...

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..

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.

From the acclaimed director of "The Moderns" and "Choose Me" we have a timeless, heartwarming tale of a deranged man living in rural Nevada who kidnaps stranded female motorists (which there seem to be an inordinate amount of for rural Nevada) and, bullwhip in hand, trains them to perform in his private circus, all the while his father who has been turned into deformed monster by radiation from nuclear tests runs amuck.

As other reviewers have noted there is a definite lack of nakedness in this movie alternatively titled "Barn of the Naked Dead", but a lot of bare breasts and female buttocks would only distract from the real (and perhaps only) reason to see this movie--Andrew Prine. Andrew Prine was second only to David Hess when it came to portraying sick psychopaths in 70's drive-in movies, but where Hess's psychos were just flat-out creeps, Prine's could be hilariously funny (even though it wasn't always clear whether the actor himself was in on the joke as he always seemed to take these roles VERY seriously). While this is far from his best work, Prine is always fun to watch.

This movie might also have a bit of "car wreck" appeal considering that it is loudly rattling skeleton in the closet of esteemed director Alan Rudolph. It has an incredibly ridiculous ending that can perhaps only be explained by Prine and the three female leads all walking off the set before the final scene leaving Rudolph to completely pull something out of his. . .well, see it and tell me where it came from. It's hard to believe that anybody would make a movie like this, let alone the otherwise respectable Rudolph.

Addendum: this movie was recently re-releaesed on DVD by Johnny Legend with brief nude scenes of overweight actresses that (partially) justify the alternate title.

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