Leofwine_draca 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.

gavin6942 The Norris family get jobs working at a seedy old carnival as a cover for searching for their missing son who disappeared after visiting said carnival. Eccentric manager Mr. Blood turns out to be a vampire while the evil owner Malatesta rules over a gaggle of ghastly ghouls who watch silent movies when they aren't feasting on human flesh.Director Christopher Speeth grew up in the world of theater, and at college was trained in the tradition of the documentary. He made one film called "Sugar" following two very different diabetics, and then "Dona Nobis Pacem", an anti-Vietnam War film featuring footage of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. If he had done nothing else, this footage would have made him immortal, even if not necessarily famous.By pure coincidence, Speeth met Richard Grosser on an airplane. Grosser had a strange background, starting out as a violin virtuoso and then getting mixed up in the development of the ENIAC and UNIVAC computers. Grosser proposed the idea of a horror film to Speeth, with his thought on the matter being quite simple: under the current rules, an investment in a film could be used as a tax shelter. The film was birthed as a write-off!Playwright Werner Liepolt was hired to construct a script. He started with legendary cannibal Sawney Bean (also a source for "Texas Chainsaw massacre" and "Hills Have Eyes") and then incorporated circus elements. Allegedly, Speeth's house had a fortune telling machine and merry-go-round horses converted into chairs, so Liepolt assumed this was the sort of thing Speeth would like to see on screen. Liepolt was very conscious of the words he used, with "carnival" literally being a celebration of meat.Much of the film's dreamlike narrative came about during post-production. The movie was edited again and again, which produced a non-linear quality to the picture, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. If you like cut and dried plots, this might not be for you.You might wonder, if this is a good film (and it is), why have I not heard of it? Well, there could be many reasons, but the biggest is simply that the film was not available. Apparently after a screening or two, it ended up in Christopher Speeth's attic, collecting dust until 2003. At that point, Windmill Films released it on DVD, but it quickly went out of print. Don't be ashamed if you never heard of Windmill Films, because no one else has either.This film is presented on glorious blu-ray as part of Arrow Video's American Horror Project (Volume 1). Of the three films in the set, it appears to be the leanest on special features, with no audio commentary listed. But this is just an oversight, as we do have one, from Richard Harland Smith of Video Watchdog. Furthermore, we do have brand new interviews with director Christopher Speeth and writer Werner Liepolt which should provide viewers with plenty of insight. (If you're still hungry for more, track down a copy of the December 2009 issue of Video Watchdog and check out the in-depth article from Shaun Brady.)

HumanoidOfFlesh Malatesta's carnival of blood welcomes its guests with cannibalistic ghouls and blood-sucking vampires.It's weird and very loosely narrated assault on the viewer's senses.The sets and images are gloriously surreal,the atmosphere is dreamy and there is a nice amount of blood as we see the ghouls devouring its human prey.The action is fast and there are some truly odd characters for example Malatesta,a creepy dwarf named Bobo with his annoying French accent,psychotic Mr.Blood and a transvestite fortune teller.If you liked Frederick Hobbs movies or "Death Bed:The Bed that Eats" check out "Malatesta's Carnival of Blood".8 out of 10.A surreal treat of epic proportions!

EyeAskance 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