SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Michael O'Keefe A 1967 Technicolor feature from the UK starring the versatile veteran actress Joan Crawford. Miss Crawford plays Monica Rivers the owner of a traveling circus that is suffering a dwindling attendance. Her business manager Dorando(Michael Grough)is at odds with her and wants his share of the business, he wants out. When a tightrope walker(Thomas Cimarro)falls to his death, suddenly ticket sales start increasing. A handsome Frank Hawkins(Ty Hardin)arrives wanting to prove his talent of high-wire walking without a net. Walker is hired and Dorando is mysteriously murdered. Suspicion is cast on Miss Rivers and things get worse; more deaths occur and business keeps bustling. Monica's daughter Angela(Judy Geeson)at 16 is expelled from school and is forced to join her mother at the circus. Dead bodies keep piling up under the big top and the circus folk along with Detective Supt. Brooks(Robert Hardy)are almost certain the owner is guilty of the murders in favor of building her business.Very colorful with typical circus acts. Not much acting from Crawford. Hardin seems nothing more than a proud peacock. I remember sitting in the theater with eyes clued to the screen wondering who would die next. Miss Crawford does prove to have a nice set of legs. Other players include; Diana Dors, Philip Madoc, Peter Burton and Geoffrey Keen.

Leofwine_draca A fun, campy murder mystery, from exploitation king Herman Cohen (he made I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF ten years previously. Due to the relaxed censorship laws (brought on, no doubt, by public demand for the bloodthirsty horrors of Hammer), Cohen delighted in pushing the boundaries of taste and inserting quite a few bloody sequences into this morbid little exercise in fear. While the murder mystery plot is relatively simple, interest is added by having a great ensemble cast of actors and actresses who go through all the motions. We also get all the old tried and trusted circus clichés, from the dwarf (not evil this time) to the dangerous stunts. I think circuses are a great place to set suspenseful films, seeing as many of the situations rely on danger and excitement as their ingredients anyway...Joan Crawford (STRAIT-JACKET) plays her typical character - hard, ruthless and ambitious. She's totally unlikable in this film and her ego must have been huge, seeing as she walks around in revealing clothes for much of the film. And how old was she? 60? It's just not natural. The American import, Ty Hardin, is pretty bland and unlikeable...I definitely could have done without his presence as he added nothing to the movie for me.But I'll forgive Cohen, as he brings Michael Gough (KONGA) out of the wardrobe for another outing, Gough being another ruthless and cold character - a perfect match for Crawford, come to think of it. My only complaint is that he's given far too little screen time. Judy Geeson (FEAR IN THE NIGHT) is the pretty girl caught up in the horrific acts, Geoffrey Keen (HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM) cameos as a policeman (seriously, what else?), and Diana Dors (THEATRE OF BLOOD) adds some glamour to the proceedings. Robert Hardy, familiar to British audiences from his turn in ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL, makes a suitably charismatic policeman and bears an uncanny resemblance to Leslie Phillips.Most of the fun comes from the deaths, and they are staged with appropriate relish by exploitation king Cohen. The opening scene where the body is hanged and swings across the screen, revealing the title, is sheer brilliance. A cheesy moment from a fun packed film, BERSERK is the kind of movie they just don't make anymore!

MARIO GAUCI The circus tent had been the stage for violence and melodrama ever since the Lon Chaney vehicle THE UNKNOWN (1927); as late as 1966, there had been the average Edgar Wallace yarn starring Christopher Lee CIRCUS OF FEAR – most notoriously, however, was CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960), whose grisliness matches that of HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)…with which the film under review shares its producer (Herman Cohen) and male lead (the late Michael Gough). Still, the latter's appearance here is rather brief – being merely a victim of the killer-on-the-loose this time around: his demise (the back of his head is perforated by a large nail hammered through the hole in a block of wood against which he was resting!), however, is almost as outrageous as the spiked binoculars from BLACK MUSEUM! Anyway, the true star here is Joan Crawford (61 years old but still showing off her legs!) – going through her horror (and final) phase: in fact, she would bow out in 1970 with TROG i.e. yet another (and even more preposterous) Cohen/Gough offering! She is the owner of a traveling circus (eventually joined by rebellious daughter Judy Geeson, who would soon flourish within the genre herself) whose star attractions and associates begin to die on her. Their non-accidental nature obviously draws the Police to the tent (represented by Robert Hardy, later of Hammer's DEMONS OF THE MIND [1972])…but Crawford herself is unperturbed, as she relishes the mass of crowds coming in every night in the hope of capturing another sensational 'accident' live! Needless to say, her callousness makes her the No. 1 suspect, especially after her rival for new performer Ty Hardin's attentions, Diana Dors (in one of the last roles where she would retain her last shapely figure), is literally sawed in half! As often happens with this type of fare, a dwarf virtually acts as Chorus throughout the proceedings; still, the identity of the killer was not hard to guess – especially since this particular character's grudge against Crawford (however honest it may have been) is spelt out some time before the actual denouement!

GroovyDoom SPOILERS (including the identity of the killer) Obviously spun off of the success of Joan's earlier film "Strait-Jacket", "Berserk!" attempts to set up a similar situation where Joan is plagued by vicious murders going on around her. The similarities don't end there, either. Once again, we get the impression that Joan's character is supposed to be a few decades younger than Joan is, giving you an odd feeling when the men in the film are directed to treat her as a sex object.Instead of a reformed murderess, Joan portrays the bun-wearing, leotard-clad owner of a traveling circus. Right away things start to go bad for the performers; one guy is doing a highwire routine when the wire snaps and, defying all laws of physics, coils around the guy's neck and hangs him. Does this qualify him as a "wire hanger"? "Berserk!" piles on the gory deaths, the most outrageous of which is when a character gets a spike driven through the back of his head and it erupts from his forehead. A scene where a woman was sawed in half would have been the most grisly, were it not for the fact that there isn't a single drop of blood anywhere, not even on the saw blade. A close runner up for most terrifying moment is when Joan and her studmuffin boy toy share a candlelight dinner in her trailer and he tells her "I'm crazy about you." Oddly enough, the writers played up to the "Strait-Jacket" legacy by having Joan's daughter turn out to be the killer, even giving her a scene where she gets to really go berserk just like Diane Baker did. The script is short and padded into a feature length by the constant insertion of seemingly unending footage of circus acts. There's no real point to showing the circus acts. They don't advance the plot, and who wants to watch a five minute elephant parade during a horror movie? There's also a meaningless musical number performed by the circus "freaks", with Tod Browning nowhere in sight. We want JOAN, dammit--Joan in a leotard, baring her legs to the crotch. Joan with her hair in a severe bun that takes on the shape of a flaxen balls of yarn on top of her head. Joan slapping a nosy photographer and Joan pushing people out of her way. Joan flirting like a schoolgirl with a guy who might actually be young enough to be her grandson. She's the real cougar in this zoo of a circus film.Let's see, since I already told you who the killer is, I might as well go all the way and tell you that she doesn't get away with her crimes. Much like Rhoda Penmark, she runs out into the rain, and while she's running through a wet patch in the grass, a cartoon bolt of lightning splits a black screen and apparently zaps her to death. Poor her. And poor Joan.