Freakshow (1989) User Reviews

Lingerie and lasers.

[BA_Harrison · 3/10 · 10 September 2018]

Freakshow. Sounds a bit like Creepshow. And, surprise, surprise, it's a horror anthology. But it's nowhere near as good as Creepshow. The stories are poorly constructed, the direction is weak, and the acting barely passable. Most of the budget seems to have gone on lingerie and lasers (or, more likely, the budget was too low to hire lasers and the owner loaned them to the movie in exchange for a credit). Perhaps they should have called it Cheapshow.

The film starts with a Twilight Zone-style voiceover from a bargain basement Burgess Meredith soundalike, after which the wraparound story begins: ambitious news anchor Shan (Audrey Landers) walks home after reporting on a movie theatre massacre, stopping to use the telephone at a bizarre museum where the owner proceeds to show her the exhibits, each of which tells a chilling story.

Tale one sees a desperate junkie Fidge (Dean Richards Wiancko) denied his next fix when a poodle runs away with his bag of dope. The second story revolves around a pizza delivery boy who bets his work colleagues that he can successfully deliver an order to a cursed house. Chapter three sees a young woman mistakenly declared dead after a recreational drug leaves her paralysed. And the final story features a pair of entrepreneurial gravediggers who sell cemetery soil to a golf club, upsetting the dead in the process.

As with many a late '80s horror, logic doesn't come into play that much, especially in the second tale, which inexplicably turns into a music video halfway through, with numerous hot women in sexy underwear performing dance moves to a bad rock song. None of the stories have very satisfying conclusions. As anthologies go, this is a pretty poor collection, and as such it is only likely to appeal to avid fans of the subgenre or those who can't get enough of offbeat low budget trash.

Misunderstood classic

[johndonny-10710 · 5/10 · 24 July 2023]

I see so many brutal reviews on this 80"s horror anthology film and it makes me smile. Reviewers seem to think it is trying to be Citizen Kane or even Creepshow. If you go into this movie expecting cinematic greatness you will not find it. However, If you are looking for a fun anthology that does not take itself that seriously and lays on a healthy portion of 80"s cheese and the offbeat feel to all things 80's then you will have some fun. We are treated to some really shaky acting and just passable affects to 80's hair metal video vixens busting out into an all out rock video while dancing in their panties before they sacrifice a pizza delivery guy who lets just say, turns the tables. Add drug stealing poodles, hard partying zombies and a gigolo named Funk and I mean what else could a true film historian want. Just grab some popcorn and turn off your brain and enjoy a stroll to a simpler time, if only for an hour and a half.

Godawful.

[sanachan · 1/10 · 28 October 2005]

Terrible, terrible movie, full of some of the worst 'horror' stories I've ever had the bad judgment to decide to sit through - I kept thinking "well, just one more, it can't possibly be as bad as the last one", and it was. And in case you're wondering, the acting stinks as bad as the writing. If you like bad movies - chances are you probably still won't like this. It's literally painful to watch the actors stumbling around delivering lines like they just woke up.

In one story, a new employee at a pizza delivery place is told to go deliver a pizza to a ... Haunted House. That is, he's told this after a lot of padding to the script. There's a girl who gets her breasts touched by a guy. And again later what may or may not be the same girl again groped by what may or may not be the same guy. Two employees getting into a knife fight in the middle of work. A woman with a REALLY bad Italian accent who obviously is supposed to own and/or run the place standing back watching mildly until everything's over then saying "oh, hey, stop that" - finally, FINALLY we get to the new guy and he's sent to "1313 Nosferatu Lane" (or something like that - a horror name or author, I've forgotten - just something horribly cheesy with 1313 in it) with the pizza to deliver. And then the guys from the pizza shop, who for some reason hate him for not being Italian (even though we're still not sure if they are) call him up and tell him he's chicken and dare him to go to the house he's already going to, etc etc. So he goes in, long, lonnnnnnnng sequence follows in which you keep expecting something horrible to happen. Instead, there's a long, loooooooooong sequence involving girls in lingerie. Badly fitting, mismatched lingerie. No nudity, for those of you about to run out and buy it for that. Just a bunch of stupid dancing in ugly lingerie for so very, very long, while a sort of damp hand with some bad press-on nail job holds the kid captive so he can't run away from the chicks dancing around him in their lingerie.

Yeah.

Anyway, they hit the kid's head against things every so often, and eventually, despite the fact that I never see anybody touch him except the hand of this one monster (the press-on nails monster) we never actually see, he becomes a vampire.

I think.

Actually he has fangs and some horns sticking out of his face. The girls have fangs yet remain pretty girls.

So anyway, he trots on back to the pizza place, comes in looking perfectly normal, mentions a bunch of girls where he went, and conveniently one of the girls then rings up and invites the rest of the guys over, and they, hearing a sexy voice, go running towards what one assumes is their doom.

And we get one last shot of nerd new boy hissing with bad fangs and horns growing out of his face.

Look, I don't know. Just don't watch it, okay? Thank me later for saving you a valuable portion of your life.

A bad '80s horror anthology with a wasted premise.

[b_kite · 2/10 · 25 September 2018]

For the longest time my only real association with this flick was from the second tale were everything just turns into a music video and the girls all strip to an 80s rock song. So I decided to finally give "Freakshow" a complete watch. The movie starts with a opening narration and then a huge group of innocent people get gunned down in a mass shooting outside of a movie theater, by a psycho who then shoots himself while lighthearted music plays. This being 2018 and there pretty much being a new mass shooting practically everyday really rather disturbed me. We then get our newswoman character played by Audrey Landers, we learn she is a completely awful person because the psycho himself tipped her off before the whole thing happened and she did nothing about it. Anyways she winds up at an old Freak show exhibit were several of the exhibits tell a horrifying tale. The first is about a druggy who murders his dealer and then chases a dog around all over town for about thirty minutes for his bag of dope before being hit my a train. The End. The second, is about a nerdy pizza delivery boy who gets a call to deliver to a haunted mansion full of hot women, the story then stops for a hilarious 80s music video rock montage and then ends absolutely stupidly. The third is about a young girl who I think overdoses on drugs, but, doesn't die. It's pretty much a rip-off of the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episode "Breakdown" but done super badly with another stupid ending. The fourth is about a widow of a golf course owner who's husband just recently died, she starts an affair with the young gravedigger (80s Hair Metal hair and all) and manages to talk him into stealing the dirt from the graves from the local cemetery to put on the golf course grass because of nutrients or some crap. Anyways its your typical zombies return to terrorize tale, and its played for laughs so yeah screw this. And it once again has no ending. We then return to the wraparound were we discover that the freak show then adds Landers to the collection. I'm not sure if this rare little movie ever got a VHS release in the states, the version I watched was a Japanese VHS rip on youtube, only other I've seen is a UK VHS, but, as it stands it doesn't matter its an interesting premise, but, done badly.

A mind-warping low budget mess

[ThePolarOne · 6/10 · 1 April 2001]

What can be said about a film where narrative form, editing and reality are totally foreign concepts. You may watch this film stone cold sober, but by the end you will feel as though your mind is jelly and that jelly is a appetizing treat that many a dwarfish freak would eat. Cue padded wallpaper.

This is allegedly a group of short stories, but no one seemed to mention to the writer that stories need endings, and if your going to film a ten minute James Bondesque strip sequence with ten very eighties looking woman they have to get their tits out! However, despite all it's insanity and pure weirdness it is in fact a throughly entertaining film with belly laughs throughout.

"Society"

Misunderstood.

[IMDb · 10/10 · 7 July 2001]

This is truly an intellectual masterpiece - although I'll admit the first time through I was at a loss. After watching this seemingly disjointed set of stories, I was left with only one thought "What WAS that?".

I couldn't shake the feeling that I had completely missed the point. I put the tape back in the VCR a watched it again. This time carefully paying attention for any unifying threads. At the end of the second viewing I was convinced that I had NOT missed anything... this was just a weird movie with nothing to say.

That was it, until about 3 days later... I'm sitting at my desk and out of the blue, it comes to me "Oh, yeah!". On my way home from work I stopped at the video store and rented it out again.

I won't spoil it - I'll only say that this is indeed a profound piece of work. The very obscurity of its message serves to intensify the revelation.

Freakshow is about to begin.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 7/10 · 21 September 2012]

"Freakshow" is an anthology horror movie.It opens with surprisingly violent and unsettling mass murder massacre of late night show cinema patrons that reminded me current case of Dark Knight Rising massacre gunman James Eagan Holmes.All this carnage is recorded by bitchy news reporter Shannon Nichols and her cameraman.Four horror stories are told her by the proprietor of bizarre museum/exhibition.The first one involves luckless junkie and scared poodle,the second one has pizza delivery guy,haunted mansion and a lot of lingerie,the third one is about paralyzed but not dead woman and the final story has two greedy gravediggers,rich widow plus some cheesy zombies.Cheap production values,bad acting and nasty beginning-welcome to surprisingly enjoyable and entertaining "Freakshow".7 horror stories out of 10.

Get Ur Freak On... at the Theater!

[Coventry · 6/10 · 25 August 2021]

Horror lovers are almost by definition crazy about anthologies. This particular horror fanatic personally also believes that a horror anthology can only be great if the wraparound story is equally compelling, and even a kind of additional segment on its own. I can assure you "Freakshow" has a splendid wraparound story. Considering the title and the year of release (late 80s), the main influences for this film were obviously "Creepshow" and "The Twilight Zone";- not coincidentally two anthologies that were tremendously popular in the 80s. This certainly doesn't mean, however, that "Freakshow" is an inferior and uninspired rip-off. Quite the contrary, it's hugely entertaining and, in my humble opinion, vastly underrated. It can easily stand next to, say, "From a Whisper to a Scream", "After Midnight" and "Screamtime" as one of the 80s horror anthologies that deserve to be wider known and appreciated.

The wraparound story introduces an arrogant and emotionless female news reporter, who prefers to cover the story of a mass-shooting live on television rather than to prevent it from happening. Her cameraman is so disgusted by her sensationalism that he leaves her behind downtown, and during her search for a cab she gets lured in a museum called "The Freakshow", where the oddish curator takes her on a (very) personalized tour. As you can probably guess, the exhibits she sees here lead in the individual segments.

In the first story, a desperate junkie gets trapped in a sort of "Home Alone" situation where the Kevin McAllister role is played by a poodle with a bag of cocaine in its mouth. It's nothing special, but nevertheless entertaining. In segment two, the newly recruited delivery boy of an Italian restaurant has to bring a pizza - with positively no garlic - to an address on 1313, Bram Stoker Avenue. He's welcomed by a house full of vampire brides, but the boy has a secret identity of his own. The idea behind this short story is original, but poorly handled. Also, even though featuring a lot of scantily clad 80s beauties, the erotic vampire dance rituals last far too long. Besides, the vampires here wear the most ridiculous and unconvincing sets of fake teeth I have ever seen. The third and shortest segment is definitely the best. A girl who OD'd witnesses her own embalming process because her mind isn't quite as lifeless as her body yet. I'm pretty sure I've seen this concept before somewhere, probably in "The Twilight Zone", but it nevertheless remains terrifying. Last but not least, segment four stars two punk grave diggers who think they stumbled upon a profitable business by selling the dirt from underneath the tombstones as fertilizer. However, the dead don't approve of their final resting places being desecrated. The tone of this zombie story is mainly comical and silly, but it has a handful of ingenious moments and terrific make-up effects.

It was so good I still remember it 32 years later fun and scary

[sadie_m_lady · 10/10 · 7 October 2021]

Judy Landers is what or who I remember most about this movie fun ad scary. Still not released on Apple TV or prime sad isn't it.

Horrible horror anthology from up north

[lor_ · 10 April 2023]

My review was written in May 1989 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Freakshow" is a rock-bottom horror film that only a tax loss specialist could love, Prospects are rotten in all media.

Amateurishly directed and acted opus consists of four horror stories, linked by the flimsy premise of loathsome tv newscaster Audrey Landers trapped in a curiosity collection exhibit by its goofball curator Peter Read.

Tales, wholly lacking in awe or ingenuity, go from bad to worse: an endlessly padded episode of a drug addict lured to his death by a poodle with a bag of heroin in its mouth; a pizza delivery boy who survives a night at an evil mansion located at 1313 Bram Stoker Blvd.; a ripoff of a classic "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to episode in which a paralyzed girl (from drugs again) is subjected to an autopsy while still alive and conscious; and a stupid story of ghouls rising from their graves to punish two gravediggers who are stealing the dirt from the cemetery to sell it to a golf course (!).

Level of tastelessness here is evidenced in the final segment when a goon finds out the dead and come back, and exults: "That's great! That means there'll be a Beatles reunion".

Director Constantino Magnatta embarrassingly tries to simulate music videos, with terrible rock songs frequently thrown in and girls sashaying in their underwear (one couldn't call it dancing). Heavy-handed use of spiral patterns to try and hypnotize the audience plu bookended setting of the pic in a movie theater doesn't work.