Once again Code Red have done an exemplary job in releasing the best-quality version of an old B-movie horror flick and giving it a new lease of life for the 20th century. Having watched TERROR CIRCUS - perhaps best known under its exploitative title BARN OF THE NAKED DEAD - you wonder why they've bothered when the end result is so trashy. Long-running actor Andrew Prine plays the usual psycho guy living out in the desert with a mother fixation. He likes to kidnap young women, chain them up, keep them as slaves in his barn, and occasionally have them perform as part of his own private circus. The film is fairly well put together for what is obviously a movie made entirely on the cheap, but the end result is merely silly and mean-spirited. Nudity and some bloodshed are thrown in to keep the horror fans pleased, but the only time this entertains is at the very end with the zombie twist. In its focus on the humiliation of women it seems to be a precursor to BLOODSUCKING FREAKS.
Review of Terror Circus
