Sunday 6 August 2017

CARNIVAL OF BLOOD

CONTAINS SPOILERS, FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, WHICH BY THE LOOK OF IT WAS CHANGE FROM A SIXPENCE

Industrial strength grot in which intergalactically horrible people are murdered at the amusement arcade. Shot on the lowest possible budget, with a level of technical competence that makes Blood Sucking Freaks look like Blade Runner and some songs that are only slightly less musical than listening to your fridge defrosting, Carnival Of Blood is a 1970 atrocity of shoddy, bone-rotting tedium that has now been released online, for reasons beyond any comprehension, instead of being chucked in a skip and ceremonially burnt. (I'm not suggesting it should be destroyed because it's absolutely terrible, merely that it wouldn't be any great loss to the civilised world if it had been.)

There's really nothing to be gained from recounting the plot, but what the hell... Aggressive, troublemaking customers are being murdered at the Coney Island amusement park: following visits to the fortune teller (who sees something horrible in their cards) and the balloon-bursting darts stand, someone follows them in the darkness and brutally kills them. Methods include decapitation, disemboweling and eye gouging, but who could it be? The audience's suspicion is directed towards hulking, scarred Gimpy (Burt Young in his debut, credited as "John Harris"), the assistant at the darts stand, but other possible suspects include the grasping fortune teller and the newly appointed Assistant D.A. who claims he wants to make a name for himself by solving the case and dragging his artist fiancee along as his cover.

That all makes it sound a hell of a lot more interesting than it really is. It's a miserable, artless film: dreary songs and a lousy score based around dragging a key over the strings of a piano, several appearances of the microphone, and apparently endless scenes of talking that go absolutely nowhere. Credit to the cast for committing pages and pages and pages of painful, prattling dialogue to memory (much of it delivered in long takes) but no credit to them for delivering it. At the end the villain gets an extended flashback freakout sequence, revealing that it all links back to some childhood trauma, then is quickly killed off in an accident and the damnable thing stops.

There's nothing to be gained by this, no entertainment value of the so-bad-it's-great Golden Turkey variety. This isn't bad in the way of Michael Bay or Rob Zombie, this isn't bad in the way of Cannon Films, this isn't bad in the way of video nasties. It's bad in the way of Al Adamson and Ted V Mikels and Herschel Gordon Lewis: cheap, miserable, tatty and thoroughly depressing. Amazon's online version is fullscreen and taken from a scratchy cinema print (with "cigarette burn" reel-change markers and green lines throughout), but even that doesn't give it any nostalgic grindhouse charm. Utterly, hypnotically rotten in all departments.

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