Unrated, 1 hr. 4 min. Directed By:
Tod Browning. Release Date:
Feb 20, 1932. DVD Release
Date: Aug 10, 2004.
I’m not sure what I expected when I sat down to
watch Freaks: certainly, I expected the eponymous men and
women that used to be a part of circus and carnival life. I realized belatedly that in the 30s, this
probably would have scared the hell out of its audience, and not just because
of some of the people in the movie had real deformities, but because of the
whole, you know, murder bit. That aspect
of the movie didn’t hold up so well with the passing of time, and once I
realized that Hans in this movie also represented the Lollipop Guild, I’m not
sure that this movie ever stood a ghost of a chance.
Now, there’s plenty about this movie that gave me
the heebie jeebies. Unfortunately,
mostly those heebie jeebies came from the assorted freaks and I was concerned
that this movie was intended as exploitation.
They certainly played up the reaction the audience would already have,
and in the movie’s opening scenes, the differences between the freaks and the
handful of “normal” people are marked.
It took me a little time to realize that as painful
as it was to watch some of these poor people (and know that they were real
people and not actors wearing makeup or using special effects to make
themselves seem “other”), I realized that they weren’t the real horrors. Watching Cleo and Hercules plot the murder of
someone I initially thought was a child with a throat disorder was the real
problem. They were the real monsters, and
the folks that attracted my attention so easily were the distraction. I got suckered in to it like just about
everyone else who has watched Freaks.
But the movie has some problems for me: I had a hard time understanding nearly
everyone in the cast. Some had thick
accents, some speech impediments, and some communicated with pseudo-speech. It was an echo of English, but you had to
work to get through it. I also thought the
story could have been a little stronger.
It was too much like someone had just passed their first English
composition class and was aching to try out the steps of the story line for
their very own. The filmmakers here get
props for doing something a little different, but different doesn’t always make
up for problems in structure.
