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The first half updates Partie de Campagne, the second goes into House of 1000 Corpses. The Carpenter POV prowl leads to the Hitchcock shower, the blade bends against the screaming beauty's flesh because it's a prank, just a tour of the paraphernalia in a horror buff's bedroom. Four youths (Elizabeth Berridge, Cooper Huckabee, Largo Woodruff, Miles Chapin) itching for a thrill on date night, the local carnival fits the tawdry bill. "Who is mad enough to enter that world of madness," wonders the barker (Kevin Conway) whose misshapen offspring (Wayne Doba) handles roustabout duties behind a mask of Karloff's Frankenstein Monster. The mask comes off to reveal what looks like William Blake's flea with a Kabuki wig, the after-hours rendezvous with the fortune teller (Sylvia Miles) leaves a dead body and four witnesses locked in the funhouse. "I'm just protecting my family." This clamorous variant of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has its self-reflexive side, mechanisms of pleasure turn to terror in sideshow and Tobe Hooper's cinema alike, one spook racket recognizes another. An unholy son et lumière, hellish colors and blaring sounds and the grinding gears underneath them all. Conway's presence points up the proximity to The Elephant Man, William Finley's rich cameo adds a grain of Dracula to the texture. Horndogs and charlatans, proselytizers and mutations, "creatures of God, ladies and gentlemen, not man." On the margins is the end of innocence of a brat (Shawn Carson), the boy weaned on Hollywood fright who comes to discover the real world where someone will point a rifle at you for a laugh. Dawn brings not relief but an animatronic's mocking chortle at the bleary, shattered survivor. "Hit yerself, you ugly thing!" With Jeanne Austin, Herb Robins, and Sonia Zomina.
--- Fernando F. Croce |