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Carnival Of Blood
[Something Weird Video]
1970; color
Directed by Leonard Kirtman
Starring: Earle Edgerton, Judith Resnick, Martin Barlorski, Burt Young & Kaly Mills
Curse Of The Headless Horseman
[Something Weird Video]
1970; color
Directed by Leonard Kirtman
Starring: Ultra Violet, Marland Proctor, Claudia Reame, Don Carrara & Lydia Rosenbloom
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With the old Coney Island midway, circa 1970, as a backdrop for murder, gore and more, Carnival Of Blood has potential promise but delivers little. The story revolves around a 20-something hippie girl, who's apparently some sort of artist; her fiancé, who's just been promoted to Assistant DA; and the hippie girl's upstairs neighbor, a seemingly harmless carny worker who dotes on the girl and her beau. (Anyone wanna guess who the killer is?) The carny's stand on the midway is the old 3-for-a-quarter dart game, where you have to hit two balloons to win a prize. In this case, giant teddy bears are the prize, but it seems every couple who frequents the stand is made up of an over-bearing / obnoxious woman with either a drunk or milquetoast of a man on her arm. To get rid of annoying clientele like this, he gives away teddy bears and tells the couples to scram. Curiously enough, everyone goes right from the dart stand to the fortune teller, who seems to know just enough to get the rubes interested... then she says she can't read any more and throws the couples out. After this happens, in some way or another, the offending female ends up either beheaded, disemboweled or otherwise hacked up in a gruesome fashion. Meanwhile, the ADA starts to get all gung ho about getting info on the case, which leads to tension and lots of fights between him and the hippie girl; which, in turn, leads to the inevitable freak out of the carny killer, his confrontation with the girl, and his eventual demise. Had this been done on a bigger budget, and with a better cast and director, this film could have rivaled an HG Lewis gore flick but, at best, it comes off as a bad attempt to nick Lewis' style, sans the black humor that makes his work so endearing and enduring.
The second, even more hapless feature, Curse Of The Headless Horseman, plays out more like an episode of Scooby Doo or a really bad TV Movie Of The Week. A "hip", "young" doctor inherits an Old West theme park from his grandfather, except the property won't legally become his unless he can turn a healthy profit on the joint in six months. So what does any "hip," "young" doctor do? He moves himself, his fiancee, and a busload of hippie friends out to the place to live there, fix it up and run it. While there's a healthy amount of "hey, let's put on a show…" here, for the most part this lackluster flick seems to stand around and do nothing. Until three people get killed (directly or indirectly) by a headless horseman who, as legend has it, only appears during some mystical moon phase. Then everyone starts freaking out and accusations start to fly, leading up to - as previously stated - a very Scooby Doo-like scenario. Except with lots of fake blood and a dead bad guy at the end. Even the presence of Warhol Factory star UltraViolet (as a Baroness who happens to be the world's wealthiest stripper) couldn't make this nightmare more pleasant.
—the Kommandant
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