She Freak

Waitress Jade Cochran quits to join the circus. She's waiting tables again but she is quickly befriended by dancing girl Pat 'Moon' Mullins. Steve St. John is the owner.

The acting is painfully amateurish. The lead actress is all false attitude. It's also not an appealing character. The fake acting is really annoying. It's an amateur low-budget indie and it's pretty bad. The filmmaking is poor. The story is a melodramatic pulpy mess. The most compelling aspect is the real life circus location. I'm more interested in a montage of setting up the rides than the plot. I love the circus paintings in the background. They look gorgeous. Everything else is pretty bad.

Bored diner waitress Jade (Claire Brennen) joins the carnival in search of excitement, where she quickly worms her way into the affections of wealthy freak show manager Steve St. John (Bill McKinney), the carnival's most eligible bachelor. After a whirlwind romance, and a short engagement, the pair get married, but it's not long before Jade is out seeking thrills with loutish ferris wheel foreman Blackie (Lee Raymond), who happily gives her a ride for free. When Steve learns from pal Shorty that his wife is banging Blackie, he confronts the uncouth carnie, only to get a knife in the belly for his troubles. As a result, delighted Jade inherits her late husband's lucrative business, but her hatred and mistreatment of the sideshow's exhibits means it not long before the ruthless ex-waitress gets served her just desserts.

She Freak, a virtual remake of Tod Browning's 30s horror classic Freaks, opens with a solid five and a half minutes of carnival footage—shot after tedious shot of carnies plying their trade to happy punters—before eventually getting down to telling a story. Throughout the film, director Byron Mabe continues to make maximum usage of his carnival setting, regularly interrupting the action with further prolonged shots of people risking their lives on rather precarious looking fairground rides while eating unwholesome food purchased from dodgy concession stands. Strip this excess of colourful padding from this cheapo drive-in garbage and there really isn't a whole lot left—certainly nothing to get your average exploitation/horror fan excited about.

Considering the film was produced by trashmeister David F. Friedman, whose filmography boasts such legendary titles as Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and Love Camp 7, it should come as no surprise to find that, in terms of style and atmosphere, She Freak is no match for the masterpiece that inspired it; however, it is rather shocking to discover that the film is remarkably light on both sleaze and gore. The bloodletting is limited to an unconvincing screwdriver through the hand during a fight between carnies and there is no sex or nudity to speak of (unless you count off-screen nookie and a few brief glimpses of skin from sexy sideshow stripper Moon, played by Lynn Courtney). Worse still, the film's genuine 'freaks' are limited to one dwarf (Felix Silla, Twiki from Buck Rogers), a sword swallower, and a June Whitfield lookalike who plays with snakes—no match for the collection of genuinely disturbing human oddities that helped make Tod Browning's Freaks such a memorable movie.

Let's get this out of the way: this is a terrible movie. The performances are campy. The conclusion is inevitable and foretold by the title. The story could've been told in less than half the time. However, the... let's call it "relaxed" pace of this film works in its favor. I am a big fan of carnival imagery, so the numerous long (and I do mean long) montages of the fairgrounds, day and night, sometimes featuring the film's characters (but usually not), are quite compelling. The dark jazzy score is very much of its time and is A LOT, full of intrusive sleazy horns and dramatic percussion (again, this is a plus for me). The lead performer, Claire Brennan, is very watchable and has a striking look reminiscent of Mary Woronov.

_She Freak_ is certainly one of the more accessible of Friedman's post-HG Lewis movies. Obviously intended to target drive-ins, it lacks the more objectionable (and usually dull) `adult' material of his other pictures, and spends more time on the plot. Other strengths include actors that know their lines and location footage (at a carnival) that offers a bit more visual diversity than is usual in the extreme low-budget 60's field.

That said, however, the film is deeply flawed and far from a classic. It is frequently billed as a `remake' of Tod Browning's _Freaks_, which is true to an extent, but not in the way one would hope. Clearly the writer took the concept of a selfish carnival girl who is punished by the freaks for her ill-treatment of one of their number and ran with it. Unfortunately, it did not inspire him to particular heights.

The most notable difference between this film and its inspiration is the aspects of carny life upon which they focus. _Freaks_ focused on the title characters – showing their lives and loves, how sideshow freaks were people with feelings who banded together against a world that despised them. _She Freak_, by contrast, seems mostly concerned with the people behind the scenes: the concessioners and `ride boys' and the Grips (or whatever their called in carny talk) that set up and tear down the big show. Something like 10 minutes of footage is sweaty guys working with tent poles, so if that's your thing…As far as sideshow acts are concerned: there's a coochy-dancer (who goes `as far as the law allows,' evidently in a bible-belt state), a sword-swallower, a snake charmer and a fortune-teller. Even the one real `freak' of the film, the unfortunate `Shorty' the midget, gets very little screen time and never performs whatever act he is supposed to have.

The other glaring flaw is the character development. The main character, Jade, starts the movie as a bitch, then is re-introduced as a sympathetic character with high hopes, then spends the rest of the movie bouncing back and forth. It got so bad that I started to regard the movie as a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale, with the `bad' Jade progressively screwing up the aspirations of the `good' Jade. But, unlike Stevenson's story, there is no explanation for Jade's dual personality, and no way to predict which side of her would emerge. A more interesting take, had the writer and director been up to the challenge, would have been to portray Jade as starting out nice, but gradually becoming `jaded' (sorry, couldn't help that pun) over the course of events and hard knocks in the carnival, until she went too far and had to be destroyed. Frankly, the `crime' for which she is punished (firing Shorty) does not fit the punishment she earns, and there are other characters in the film that have far more justifiable grievances than the freaks do.

One interesting hallmark of the low-budget Friedman approach deserves note. The extended silent sequences, in which the audience is treated to musical montages of images that are supposed to suggest action. Aside from the aforementioned set-up, tear-down sequences, the entire courtship of Jade and her prospective husband is handled in this way. Up until his last two or three scenes, pretty much the only thing this actor says is `Hello.' On the whole, this is actually a good thing.

Overall, it's worth it for exploitation completists, and is a watchable film, but not generally recommended.

A "waitress" named Jade dreams of a better life. Her chance at living her dream arrives in the form of a carnival. Indeed, Jade soon becomes a carnival "waitress".

One day, Jade wanders into the freak show tent, and, filled with hatred and revulsion, she sets out to treat them with disdain. As Jade's star rises, she winds up in charge of the entire carnival, unaware that the freaks she so despises have had enough of her tyranny.

Sort of a ham-handed "remake" of FREAKS from Director Tod Browning, SHE FREAK lacks every quality that made Browning's film a classic. It's cheapness is no excuse for the overall dullness of the production.

On the upside, if you love carnivals, this movie does use a near-documentary approach to show carnival operations in all their glory...