Scott LeBrun Veteran cult favourite Andrew Prine excels here in one of his wonderfully warped 70's leading roles. He plays Andre, a sick, twisted freak living in seclusion in the desert, who comes upon a trio of aspiring showgirls trying to make their way to Vegas and who have had car trouble. He seems to be benevolent, but in reality is about to add them to his captives - a group of women he keeps chained up in his barn. The misogynistic Andre views these women as no more than (performing) animals, yet to add to his quirks he has a Norman Bates style mother fixation (he comes to believe that one of these girls actually *is* his long dead mother) and keeps his dear old dad, who mutated as a result of H bomb testing, confined on his large amount of property. Meanwhile, there's a concurrent story of the girls' agent (Chuck Niles) desperately trying to find them. Some exploitation fans can certainly take issue with a movie that they may feel really doesn't go far *enough*; for one thing, the nekkid-ness promised by the DVD cover is in actuality quite fleeting! That's not to say there isn't some fun to be had from the premise and some of the scenes. Our macabre ringmaster is fond of whipping the girls, will sometimes drench them in blood and sic his big cat on them, and in one deliciously creepy scene, introduces one of the girls to his pet snake. And when we finally get a look at the deformed dad (makeup effects by Byrd Holland, who also plays a small role, and Douglas White), he's a hoot to behold. The girls are all pleasing to look at (there's also a small role for busy 70's era exploitation actress Jennifer Ashley, as the flower child), but the one to watch here is clearly Prine, who, as can be expected, acts the Hell out of his role; even if he does indeed regret making this movie, one wouldn't know it from the performance he gives, the mark of a true professional. The movie is admittedly quite a gritty and rough little production - perhaps the single most fascinating aspect is realizing that it's an early directorial effort for Robert Altman protégée and independent auteur Alan Rudolph, one that it's all too easy to believe he would want left off his resume. But it's reasonably enjoyable for exploitation buffs, right down to the downbeat ending typical of so many other A *and* B movies of the 1970's. Somewhat disappointing but not too bad. Seven out of 10.

EyeAskance The woefully underrated Andrew Prine struts through this lousy but shamefully likable mess with a casual and unaffected "yeah, but at least I'm working" charisma. In BARN OF THE NAKED DEAD aka NIGHTMARE CIRCUS, he portrays a mother-fixated psychotic who keeps a private zoo of captive women at an off-road Nevada desert property...a ruinous, weather-beaten old ranch in precarious proximity to a government nuclear testing site . The girls are a stock of resistant performers used in Prine's sadistic circus-themed psychodramas, and if that's not weird enough to win you over, there's also a radioactive mutant and a hungry black panther added to the cuckoo mix. As addle-brained 70s shockers go, this can be pretty enjoyable if expressly accepted as the unrefined trash that it is. The overwhelming dearth of professionalism will likely be met with disapproval from a mainstream viewership, but trash-curious types and those of lax standards should find it quite embraceable.5.5/10

byght This movie. Wow. This movie."Worst Movie of All Time" is a pretty tough thing to decide. Do you give it to the greatest of all "worst" movies? ("Plan 9 From Outer Space") Do you give it to the most poorly put-together movie ever? ("Red Zone Cuba") Or do you control for budget differences and give it to the artistically worst movie ever? ("Batman and Robin")At the end of the day, I think you have to give it to the most unwatchable movie ever, for what are movies if not...um...things for watching? Anyway, this is it.I remember a barn and some girls. I remember a tool with a whip saying "raise them, lower them." I remember an outhouse with a jacked-up wookie living in it, and maybe something about a cougar, but I might be making that up. The rest of the movie is basically unintelligible because the dialogue was recorded by a microphone buried 30 miles into the earth's crust. Even if you could hear it, there are no words that could soothe this awful pain as it emanates from the bleak landscape of Midwestern scrub-brush. Here's a fun game: have a competition with your friends to see how long you can go without looking at the clock. The longest we got was about five minutes, and that was only through concentrated willpower. Okay, I lied, it's not a fun game at all, but it's a way to help get through the movie. Other possible solutions: heroin, suicide, blindness or a lobotomy. I normally love bad movies and recommend them to my friends, but this is an exception. I am not kidding here. To you bad-movie amateurs out there, take it from someone who has been to film hell and back more than once: this is not "so bad it's funny," it's just bad. In fact, it's the worst. DO NOT SEE THIS.

aazathoth Barn of the Nekkid Dead - or Nightmare Circus - is a film about a demented young man named Andre who captures women and keeps them chained in the barn. He believes that he is the ringleader of a circus and that they are the trained animals in his act. Andre is a psychopath, but it's not all his fault - his mother left him when he was very young and his father has turned into a murderous radioactive mutant. Andre crushes rebellion among his animals by feeding would-be rebels to his pet mountain lion or to his father.The obvious moral of the story would be that men treat women horribly, be it is more likely that the pretense of the moral is an excuse to show attractive young women chained and whipped. The best part of this movie is the ending. Help is on the way in the background from the beginning but by the time it arrives at the barn, Andre's father has killed almost everyone. It's refreshing to watch a film without a morally happy ending.