Carnival of Souls
(1962)
[DVD Info]

After a drag race goes wrong and their car flies off a bridge; the only survivor Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) crawls up to shore. To forget her harrowing ordeal, she takes a job as a church organist in a neighboring town. On her trip she begins to hallucinate. She sees faces in the window and men in front of her car. She also keeps seeing a large building on the horizon that looks like a carnival tent. At one point she becomes so frightened she runs her car off the road. She manages to make it to a gas station, where she asks about the building she kept seeing in the distance. The man at the gas station explains that it was once a carnival but was shut down many years before. The next day she beings her new job as a church organist. Everyone in the town thinks she’s wonderful, although a bit anti-social. Her boss, a priest, takes her to the abandoned carnival to talk. She suggests they break in, but the priest wants to keep in favor of the good lord and they leave. The more time passes, the weirder her life becomes. Randomly it becomes very quiet and no one can hear or see her. She keeps seeing a spooky man following her, and her neighbor down the hall of the boarding house she’s staying at keeps trying to force himself on her. She thinks she’s truly going crazy and somehow the carnival in the distance is the only way she can save her sanity.

The race begins when the light turns gray.
When looking for a sunken car and bodies, perhaps one should look further than three feet offshore.
If you see a face in your window while driving, floor it.
There’s something sexy about a man who begins drinking at 8 in the morning.
Never accuse a man of being an alcoholic when he starts drinking at 8am. It’s called being a regular guy.

"Fill it up!" ~Mary to the gas station attendant.

So BORING!

Oh. My. God. So, I know that this film is a cult classic and that it has a huge following…but this had to be the most boring, predictable, and long movie I have ever seen. It wasn’t because it was black and white (I liked The Bat and House on Haunted Hill) and not because it had cheesy, over-the-top acting (I like that sometimes) but because not one thing happened during the whole movie. She drives, she plays some organ, some sleazy jerk hits on her, she sees some man following her, etc. It’s weird that she thought this carnival could solve all her problems. The carnival doesn’t even have a cool back-story. It’s not an EVIL carnival…it’s just some carnival that was some sort of building before. Why did it have souls in it? Was it like a vortex to the underworld? That would’ve been cool. But no. It’s just some crappy carnival that shut down a few years before. So…after sitting through all this organ playing with the devil and this crazy bi-polar alcoholic that wants to sleep with her, the ending is so expected. It feels like such a waste of time. It’s like…”really? I guess that was the ending 4 HOURS AGO! Buh!” Well…not four hours but that’s what it felt like. This movie seriously wouldn’t end. Now…this type of ending was probably really shocking back in 1962 but it wasn’t so much for nowadays. The ending would’ve been cool if the entire movie wasn’t so painful to sit through. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I think my friend best described it when she said, “This movie should be called ‘Carnival of Crap’!” With extended organ play, drag races gone wrong, choppy editing, extreme sheet music close-ups, sleazy alcoholics, doctors acting like psychiatrists, mistaken identities, and predictable-ness, the jury gives this flick:

(Violently Bored)

[BACK]