I watched CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960) in two installments, thanks to me falling asleep while watching it last night. It was in no way boring, I was just very sleepy, so I finished it a few minutes ago.
The story begins in 1947 and revolves around Dr. Rossiter (Anton Diffring), a renegade plastic surgeon in England who works miracles with a scalpel, but some of his early and illegal experiments leave some of his patients permanently disfigured and driven mad by their irreversible facial deformity.
Rossiter flees the authorities, running over and killing one while driving through a barricaded road, totaling his car in the process, but he makes his way to the home of his surgical assistants, a brother and sister team, and has them surgically alter his face. The trio then escape into France where Rossiter, now operating under the name Schuler, comes into possession of a failing circus when the previous owner (Donald Pleasance), in an act of financial desperation, signs over the rights to the circus to the surgeon, after which the former owner is mauled to death by a bear while drunk. Rossiter witnessed the incident and could have helped the previous owner, but he lets him die in order to have no possible resistance to his claim on the circus. He also takes over raising the dead owner's young daughter, whom he performed surgery on to fix the facial scars she suffered during the bombings of World War II.
The story then skips ahead by a decade and finds the circus making money hand over fist under Schuler’s management. He staffs the circus with women he found on the street, prostitutes and criminals, all of whom had facial disfigurements that he fixes for free, and they then join his circus in various performance capacities, some of which are highly dangerous. The big top travels all over Europe and gains a reputation as “the jinx circus,” thanks to its female stars occasionally meeting grisly fates during their acts, so the potential of witnessing live death puts asses in seats and the public eats it all up. During all of this, Schumer has affairs with several of his performers, all of whom he beautified with his surgical wizardry, but when they express a desire to leave the circus or if they step out of line in any way, with the help of his male surgical partner he orchestrates their deaths during performances, always ensuring it looks like an accident. But the circus’s gruesome reputation catches the attention of a reporter who begins investigating the circus, a journalist who happened to have covered the Rossiter case ten years earlier and would love to see that case closed. His investigation leads him to deduce that Schuler is the vanished Rossiter, and as he gets closer to solving the case, the bodies pile up and Rossiter becomes more unhinged…
Released a year after the not dissimilar HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM and the same year as the epochal PEEPING TOM and PSYCHO, CIRCUS OF HORRORS merrily doles out its sleazy thrills in a manner that was no doubt quite shocking to the British audience of its era. Hammer horror, with its “Kensington gore”and emphasis on femine pulchritude, was still a relatively new flavor, and its success guaranteed that other studios would imitate its lurid content. CIRCUS OF HORRORS look and feels like a grubby pulp novel brought to vivid life, and it’s a lot of fun. The kills are all telegraphed a mile away, but it’s a matter of building suspense until the inevitable happens, and getting there was quite nail-biting for its era.
The performances are all solid, and Anton Diffring is terrific as Rossiter/Schuler. And if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the cast features a number of soon-to-be-familar faces, including Donald Pleasance, Yvonne Monlaur (the heroine in Hammer’s BRIDES OF DRACULA), an uncredited pre-R2-D2 Kenny Baker as a circus dwarf, Yvonne Romain (best known as the mute servant girl who is raped by a feral dungeon prisoner and subsequently gives birth to a werewolf in CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF), and an uncredited Walter Gotell, who would later appear in seven James Bond films, first as the major domo of SPECTRE island, and then appearing six times as Soviet General Gogol.
Bottom line: CIRCUS OF HORRORS is solidly entertaining in ways that were sure to have outraged genteel British sensibilities at the time, but must have been a favorite among the more viscerally-inclined audience members. RECOMMENDED.
No comments:
Post a Comment