Freaks (Matt)

I wasn't sure what exactly to expect going into this movie. I had read up about it on Wiki, but I had purposely avoided any plot summaries save for the very basic ones. While doing my research I read about the horrors of the film. I read about how the movie was banned in many countries and is in fact still banned in some states. Now granted, these bans are not enforced at all. They are comparable to those lists of weird laws that you'll see around the Internet every so often. You know what I mean, it might be illegal in some states to drive a tractor on Sunday, or maybe it's illegal to tie a horse up backwards to a doorknob or something like that. What this made clear however, was that this movie was looked at as sort of an abomination. Perhaps, to throw around a fashionable term, it was the grindhouse of the 30's.

It was hard for me to determine what, if any, point the film was trying to make. In most of the scenes the freaks are portrayed in a sympathetic manner. They are humanized and shown doing normal activities. On the other hand they are also showcased by the camera with closeups and fairly long shots. The camera shows this purposely and it feels as though the camera is showing them to us them as being freaks as much as it is saying "Hey, these guys are people too!". It was a little confusing in that regard.

Another aspect of this movie that caught my mind was the speaking. There was more than one comment made during the viewing that it sounded as if they were talking in a different language. In some cases this was true, as I think there was some German being used intermittently. However the English was very dated. It was hard to follow what they were talking about throughout much of the movie. They used a dated slang and on top of that the sound quality wasn't all that great. This actually helped me pay attention to the movie because I had to focus in order to understand what was being said.

I liked this movie. It's not very often that a film that is dated this far back can actually hold my attention, and this one did. The story was interesting, the characters were interesting, and the um... deformities... were interesting. I'll give it 7 squawking duck ladies out of 10.


-Matt