Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD is a quirky independent horror flick of the 1970s with an evocative abandoned carnival location. The film feels a little like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes in terms of plot, with an unsuspecting family arriving at a deserted location and finding themselves assailed by the crazed family of maniacs living there. This is a dark and dingy production that manages to mix in zombies, vampires, and an evil dwarf played by The Man with the Golden Gun's Herve Villechaize. Overall, it's a very cheap and unconvincing production that doesn't really offer up anything that hasn't been seen before; it reminded me of Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, albeit not as much fun.

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973)*** (out of 4)Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich) runs a fun carnival where he hired a couple people to help run the place. What Malatesta doesn't realize is that the two people are basically working undercover because they're searching for their child that went missing at the carnival. What the parents don't realize is all the sinister things going on there including the fact that Malatesta is a vampire.MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD is the only film from director Christopher Speeth and it was pretty much forgotten and never seen for thirty-years. All of this changed when the director started selling copies of a DVD from his personal website. Before long the film gained a small reputation but then Arrow Video released it to Blu-ray and DVD in a Special Edition form. As the introduction by Stephen Thrower states, it's a pretty weird little film and certainly one that deserves more of a following.If you're looking for a coherent storyline then you probably won't enjoy this movie. There's actually very little of an actual plot and instead the film really plays off like a dream you might be having while you're also running a very high fever. Some have called the film's look psychedelic, which might be a good way to describe it. The story is basically being told by the visuals, which are actually quite striking and I'd argue that the dream-like nature of the picture actually works for it. The entertainment value certainly comes from the bizarre and surreal atmosphere.The performances are a bit all over the place with some of them being incredibly good while others are clearly being done by inexperienced actors. Still, none of them are bad enough to ruin the film. There's also an effective music score that helps build up the atmosphere and there are some really nice gore effects throughout the picture. There's not a lot of violence but when it does happen with get some of that classic 70's overly-bright red blood.MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD isn't the greatest film ever made and there are certainly some flaws throughout it including some pacing issues. Still, at just 74-minutes the film is certainly worth watching and it's bizarre and surreal atmosphere really makes it stand out.

A man named Mr. Blood (who looks like Frasier, if he dressed up like Dracula) seems to be the front man. After settling in, the more carnival workers they meet, the sooner they realize the place isn't right. The movie seems to be fairly cut, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the plot. For instance, there seems to be a revenge type back story with the man of the family by the way he talks in some scenes, but there's never any concrete evidence to prove this theory.Anyhow, when it goes dark, a whole heap of cannibals who used to be workers inhabit the carnival, and eat the flesh of people who visit. The explanation is that they eat human flesh because they were never told it was wrong, lol. Same cannibals also have great tastes in classic horror. Several scenes in a small theater show the flesh hungry crowd watching Cabinet of Dr Caligari and other films from yesteryear. There's also ghouls, a cultist/wizard named Malatesta and Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy Island. Wacky bunch of freaks, I tell ya! Most of the gut munching scenes were cut out, but you can view them in the outtakes section of the DVD. It's a shame they weren't added back in, but apparently American Zoetrope had a problem with the MPAA while remastering this lost film for DVD. A few scenes are still lost, for the time being, I believe. Either way, the cut scenes are worth watching, because it is pretty damn nasty in a few scenes. Another worthy mention of gore is a guy who smokes a joint getting beheaded while on a roller coaster. Lots of fun there, and a good creepy atmosphere.Surprisingly no nudity. Surprising because the female lead runs around for half of the movie in her nightgown, pursued by ghouls and Malatesta. Great little trippy nighttime chase scene with her through the entire carnival, where death and carnage is discovered in all corners.It has a great little bizarre ending too. Lots of fun to be witnessed in this incoherent, mindless Drive-In slice of cheese. Recommended for Fans of I Drink Your Blood and Carnival of Souls.

An off-road ramshackle amusement park is maintained and operated by an odd assemblage of resident vampires, ghouls, zombies...and Herve Villachaiz. When night falls and the gates are closed, these fun-loving fiends retreat into their subterranean home within the murky depths below the park. A strange family unit of sorts, they enjoy watching old horror classics while they wait like hungry spiders for juvenile delinquents and random miscreants to illegally enter the carnival grounds.There's an omnipresence of highly effective eeriness in this divergent, psychedelirious obscurity...in fact, the entire film is viscid with an unearthly distortion of its own secret recipe. It's entirely possible that this surreal edge could be merely incidental to misguidance or clumsiness during production(a scarce but occasional phenomenon exclusive to the country-club of penniless amateur cinema). Whatever the case, it works in a gangly, but wonderful way. MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD is a gratifying sensory overload in a very elite minor-league of uncatagorizables, agnate examples of which might include BLOOD FREAK, DEATH BED;THE BED THAT EATS, and GODMONSTER OF Indian FLATS. This crazy flick slipped through the cracks once already...let's not let it happen again.7/10