Damn Bloody Horrorcast

ONE OF US, ONE OF US, GOOBLE GOBBLE, GOOBLE GOBBLE!!!

Tonight’s feature was a film that I read about many times before but had never seen or really heard much about.  Tod Browning’s FREAKS was produced back in the golden age of hollywood cinema and remains to be one of the most controvesial films ever made.

A 60 minute feature showcasing the lives and bond between a of group of circus sideshow performers. The story itself follows a midget falling in love with a beautiful full sized acrobat. Little does he know that the acrobat is flirting and coercing him only for praise, gifts and access to his fortune. She tries to kill him with the help of her lover, the strong man, and when the freaks catch onto what’s happening, see to exact their own form of justice.

While this film was spearheaded to cash in on the new talking horror pictures from the big Hollywood studios, I don’t class it as either Horror or Exploitation. There film itself plays like an old school soap opera. A soap opera filled with midgets, limbless performers, siamese twins, a bearded lady, skeleton man and a bunch of ‘pinheads’ (microcephalics – if you wanna look it up)… Yes, its scary as shit to see a swarm of these freaks running/hobbling after the acrobat in the middle of a thunderstorm, brandishing knives and sharpened sticks but you can’t help but cheer for them during the climax. The bitch deserved it!

The UK PAL DVD I bought contains a fair bit of content, including an hour long behind the scenes retrospective on the film, the actors and the freaks, a special message prologue putting the film into context, a short feature on alternate endings and classification edits (an extra which tied up the many plotholes in the film’s ending), and a film commentary by film historian David Skal.

FREAKS is an interesting film that I enjoyed for the bizarre twist on the soap opera genre and would recommend to fans of old Hollywood horror films. It’s an exploratory delight into a world that is now nothing more than legend in our overly sensitive, pussified, politically correct society – the travelling freakshow. Check out the film or go the easy way and youtube that shit.

Seriously though. Fuck political correctness!