Alicia I love this movie so much

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Alien_Zombie "You may think you're normal. But you're all a product of mutations. Your ancestors, our ancestors were freaks"A traveling family of freaks, a crazy scientist with strange plant fixations, a deformed man who refuses to accept himself, a possible protagonist who is suddenly doomed, and one of the most original monster designs I have ever seen. All of these elements clump together rather crudely to form this bizarre, low budget horror that I really enjoyed for some reason -I partially blame the beautiful Julie Ege and Donald Pleasence-. It's creepy, campy and even sad in some parts, not to mention the crazy evolutionary ideas that it toys around with.

ZombiGurl Freakmaker opens with a lot of time lapsed film about plant life, it almost feels like a nature show, but then the creepy 70s horror music starts. We then see Donald Pleasance playing a Mad Doctor that is obsessed with trying to splice together Human DNA with plant material. The Doctor reminds me of the Evil Dr. in Eyes Without a Face, complete with living in a secluded mansion with a pack of mad barking dogs. He has an assistant, Mr. Lynch, that is deformed and keeps promising him a cure if only he will help the Dr. with his freakish research. Mr Lynch is played by Tom Baker who goes on to play the Doctor in the Doctor Who series. The Mad Dr. also keeps some sort strange plant in his laboratory that he feeds live Rabbits to. Freakmaker seems to borrow a lot from Tod Browning's 1932 Freaks. Mr. Lynch runs the carnival and gets his victims for the Dr.'s experiments from the Carnival. The Carnival has a side show showing various "Freaks", I am pretty sure these were real people with birth deformities. I am sure this must have been a controversial decision to use real people with deformities instead using make up, but I don't think this movie is one of the Video Nasties from the 70s. I wonder how it managed to get past the censors? There is even a dinner scene very similar to Freaks where they declare "he's one of us". Eventually the Freaks decide to turn on one of their own, also similar to a scene in Freaks. Even though Donald Pleasance and Tom Baker give good performances in their roles, there really just isn't much of a plot here. The special FX are pretty silly looking with a giant rubber suited "Mutation" that looks like a giant human Venus Fly Trap. Most of the film is slow moving but it is still entertaining in that strange psychedelic 70s way.

Joseph P. Ulibas The Freak Maker (1973) is another one of the Mad Scientists movies that came out during this time period. Donald Pleasence stars as another crazy doctor who plays Dr. Frankenstein. People like him should find another hobby. Turning poor saps into human oddities is not right. Who wants to walk around looking like a "lobster man" or as if your mouth is full of sausages with a bad case of acne. I don't think there are freak shows around today (unless you want to star in a FOX reality T.V. show). Well like I always say, you reap what you sow. Donald Pleasence is very restrained as the mad doctor. He's tailored made for this role. If you enjoy bad sci-fi movies with cheesy make-up, over-the-top acting and a Donald Pleasence fan step right up. Otherwise it's time to look for another film. Fair. Cxx

Theo Robertson Original is not a word to describe THE MUTATIONS . To sum up its plot it`s a hybrid between a mad scientist film and FREAKS. Unoriginality is not enough to condemn it of course , but what makes THE MUTATIONS a truly terrible film is the fact that it`s so sickening.When Tod Browning made FREAKS in the 1930s disabilty and deformatity were I imagine treated differently in those days. Not so in the 1970s when the concept of a traveling " freakshow " wouldn`t have drawn an audience. Indeed it`s highly unlikely any council would have allowed it to take place on the grounds of taste due to a public outcry. There`s no way I`d pay to go and see that and I feel disgusted I watched a film where people with real deformaties are used in the name of entertainment. Perhaps the saddest one was " The skeleton woman " who looked like she`d just been rescued from a Nazi death camp.*****SPOILERS ( though how can I spoil your " enjoyment " of this filth is beyond me ) ***** I`ve outlined a good enough reason not to watch it , but may I also point out that this film is also extremely sloppy and underdeveloped in terms of script and production too. For example the hero gets turned into a man eating plant and for no reason consumes a drunken passerby. I say for no reason because he can still control his human emotions which he demonstrated in the previous scene by talking to his girlfriend and demonstrates it again at the end by attacking the villain in his lab. And this action scene seems to have been directed, edited and had make- up artists by people who were too untalented to have worked on the worst school play production . Still it could have been worse , if the rest of the film is anything to go by the production crew might have dug up a decomposed corpse and used that for the villain`s death scene. And get ready for a final shock plot twist at the end though how can anyone be shocked by the final scene when we`ve already seen exploitation of the worst sort leaves me pondering.You`re probably asking yourself why I decided to watch THE MUTATIONS all the way through instead of switching it off in disgust ? Make no mistake this film did disgust and disturb me. Well it did star a pre-fame Tom Baker as Donald Pleasence`s henchman . I can watch anything with Baker in it and to see him play a nasty piece of work does have a certain novelty value Check out VAULT OF TERROR ) , but even that didn`t stop wanting to swith off the TV frequently. And for my sins I had to get into a warm soapy bath afterwards and scrub myself clean , That`s how much THE MUTATIONS disgusted me