Malatesta's Carnival of Blood

To enjoy this movie because it's bad is to be as pretentious as the folks that made it. Incomprehensible trash from start to finish. Someone wrote this was "existential"..... no, it's just amateurish and awful. Barely a plot cobbled together so the director and set director can show how pretentious and up their own a$$ they are. Using footage from classic films that are in the public domain like some kind of homage. Did the director and writer actually watch those films? Did they notice that even with no sound they made sense? I've watched a lot of bad movies, this is hands-down one of the worst. Rather embarrassing it's made its way onto streaming, literally anything is better than watching this.

source: Malatesta's Carnival of Blood

This film was not particularly entertaining or engaging but it did have some interesting and fleetingly memorable moments and characters that feel like it could have inspired Tobe Hooper. I enjoyed the character of the trash collecting carnival ghoul with the stick and sack for picking up trash. He seemed so thrilled to find candy bar wrappers, yet was just as eager to quickly turn the pointy end of said stick on to unsuspecting, helpless carnival goers! His lazy, independently moving left eye will haunt me for days. I did seriously love the atmosphere of the real amusement park with rollercoasters and funhouse rides. That kind of atmosphere is absolutely ripe for bizarre and terrifying horror; but the filmmakers utilization left me wanting more. I wasn't crazy about the cheap set decoration of plastic bubble wrap and sheets of aluminum but I did appreciate the horde of cannibalistic underground dwellers and their penchant for tearing people limb from limb though unlike Romero, this was mostly implied. Not much in the way of gory goods, aside from one fun beheading. So much of the film feels like a dream within a dream and you're just existing in Malatesta's wicked world; however I really didn't find Malatesta or his sidekick Blood convincing; though Bobo the dwarf was decent. I feel I have to give this movie a 3 out of 10, because it is not only below average in entertainment value and fun. I just can't see myself rewatching this film aside from a few clips near the beginning and towards the middle of the film. From about mid way to the end the Carnival of Blood just completely falls into impressionist nothingness. I sadly just didn't care. Is it worth at least a one time watch? Maybe...but you could have a lot more fun with Tobe Hooper or George A Romero's early work instead.

Released with The Witch Who Came from the Sea and The Premonition as part of Arrow Video's American Horror Film Project, this movie is all about the Norris family looking for their lost son who got lost at an evil carnival. As a cover, they get jobs working in the carnival. And then things go wrong... The carnival's manager, Mr. Blood, is a vampire. Go figure, with a name like that. Meanwhile, the evil owner Malatesta is in charge of an entire army of goons who watch silent movies and eat human flesh. Hervé Villechaize from TV's Fantasy Island is one of them. After directing this movie, Christopher Eric Speeth went on to work in documentaries. This film is, well, a mess. You're never sure when something is a flashback or a dream; things appear in a fuzzy multicolored haze, much like you've been staying up all night doing drugs and listening to overly loud jam bands. I'm not saying I don't like it. I'm just trying to tell you how it is. If your idea of a good time is watching people do autopsies while singing show tunes, then you're on the right spectrum for this one.

A man named Mr. Blood (who looks like Frasier, if he dressed up like Dracula) seems to be the front man. After settling in, the more carnival workers they meet, the sooner they realize the place isn't right. The movie seems to be fairly cut, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the plot. For instance, there seems to be a revenge type back story with the man of the family by the way he talks in some scenes, but there's never any concrete evidence to prove this theory. Anyhow, when it goes dark, a whole heap of cannibals who used to be workers inhabit the carnival, and eat the flesh of people who visit. The explanation is that they eat human flesh because they were never told it was wrong, lol. Same cannibals also have great tastes in classic horror. Several scenes in a small theater show the flesh hungry crowd watching Cabinet of Dr Caligari and other films from yesteryear. There's also ghouls, a cultist/wizard named Malatesta and Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy Island. Wacky bunch of freaks, I tell ya! Most of the gut munching scenes were cut out, but you can view them in the outtakes section of the DVD. It's a shame they weren't added back in, but apparently American Zoetrope had a problem with the MPAA while remastering this lost film for DVD. A few scenes are still lost, for the time being, I believe. Either way, the cut scenes are worth watching, because it is pretty damn nasty in a few scenes. Another worthy mention of gore is a guy who smokes a joint getting beheaded while on a roller coaster. Lots of fun there, and a good creepy atmosphere. Surprisingly no nudity. Surprising because the female lead runs around for half of the movie in her nightgown, pursued by ghouls and Malatesta. Great little trippy nighttime chase scene with her through the entire carnival, where death and carnage is discovered in all corners. It has a great little bizarre ending too. Lots of fun to be witnessed in this incoherent, mindless Drive-In slice of cheese. Recommended for Fans of I Drink Your Blood and Carnival of Souls.

The weary Norris family gain employment in a freakishly dilapidated amusement park run in a somewhat desultory manner by the cadaverous proprietor, Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey) fatefully taking residence there in the hope of discovering the whereabouts of their missing son, but instead unearthing an unspeakably lurid B-movie bacchanal of surrealistic subterranean savagery more than worthy of gaudy schlock-instigator, Andy Milligan or chaotic psychotronic prankster, Ray Dennis Steckler, with an appropriately Rollercoaster-like alacrity the anxious family unsettlingly find themselves beleaguered by the increasingly nightmarish plasma craving parasites that prowl nightly in 'Malatesta's Carnival of Blood'. Director, Christopher Speeth's singularly sinister, frequently outlandish, playfully perverse, outré horror extravaganza has a decidedly warped, Todd Browning-infused Gothic dissonance that eerily imbues the shambling, decayed Amusement Park with a palpably unsettling threat of inevitable doom! A truly demented diorama wherein unspeakably vile, dark-dwelling wraiths lurk and gibber insensibly in the labyrinthine voids of this despicable, far from genteel locale; these pallid, cannibalistically-inclined ghouls all under the maniacal thrall of that eldritch moustachioed arch fiend, Malatesta himself!!! While the actors performances are uniformly exuberant, with misanthropic, Mr. Blood and the truly wretched wastrel, Mr. Stick (William Preston) expressing the film's more refined theatrical sensibilities, the real stars of the fantastically skewed, psychedelically lewd 'Malatesta's Carnival of Blood' are the actively malevolent locations and the vividly imaginative art direction of surreal visionaries 'Alley Friends', it is their phantasmagorical explosions of garish idiosyncrasy that makes, Christopher Speeth's kaleidoscopic Carnival of carnivorous calamity such an unforgettably bizarre cinematic experience. 'Perhaps, even an esoteric genre unto itself, the artfully strange nightmare 'Malatesta's Carnival of Blood' is most certainly not for the faint of mind, and while the cost of entry might initially appear to be a mere bagatelle, the price of your exit could prove infinitely steeper than you could possibly imagine! - This is the Van Der Graf Generator of progressive 70s avant-garde horror!'

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood was thought to be a lost movie until 2000, when the director eventually released the film on DVD. Some might argue that it would have been better if the film had stayed lost, but then fans of trippy z-grade garbage would have been deprived of what has to be one of the weirdest movies of all time. The film takes place in a dilapidated carnival whose owner, the enigmatic Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich), appears to be a total stranger to the term 'health and safety'. The rides not only look like death traps, they ARE death traps, the people who go on them winding up as tasty snacks for the ghouls who live in the caverns below, or simply losing their head (as one poor guy does while on the rollercoaster!). The newest employees at the carnival are Mr and Mrs Norris (Paul Hostetler and Betsy Henn), and their teenage daughter Vena (Janine Carazo), whose job it is to run a shooting gallery. However, the real reason the Norrises are there is to try and find out what happened to their son, who went missing while at the carnival. Friendly carnie Kit (Chris Thomas) tries to help Vena stay alive for the duration, but the attraction's vampiric manager Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey) has his heart set on drinking her blood. Crazy camerawork, eccentric performances (a wild-eyed litter-picking ghoul, singing cannibals, a transvestite fortune teller, and Hervé Villechaize as creepy dwarf Bobo), incomprehensible dialogue, and set design that consists largely of assorted junk, and large sheets of plastic, aluminium and bubble wrap: Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is quite unlike anything I have seen before, and quite unlike anything remotely resembling coherent film-making. The action randomly veers off into nightmarish surreality at the drop of a hat, and features bizarre characters who drift in and out of scenes, while director Christopher Speeth exercises his creativity with his oddball aesthetic combined with disconcerting sound design (the weird visuals including back projection of horror classics The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame). There's even some fun gore to be had: the aforementioned rollercoaster decapitation, death by litter-picking stick, a juicy spike in the eye, and the half-eaten body of some poor schmuck. The result is an undeniably unique experience, but so is pouring a bucket of fire ants down your trousers. 3.5/10, rounded up to 4 for Villechaize talking in rhyme.

"Malatesta's Carnival of Blood" follows a husband, wife, and their young adult daughter who visit a rundown amusement park posing as potential new employees; they are actually there to locate their missing son, who worked at the carnival. To their horror, however, the park's mysterious proprietor, Malatesta, is hiding a gaggle of cannibals in caverns beneath the rides. This little-seen horror flick plays like "Alice in Wonderland" on bad acid, but in a good way. It is remarkably low-budget, with sets that often appear to be vinyl-lined tents standing in as limestone caves (unconvincing, to say the least), but the shortcomings oddly don't seem to matter because they are obscured by the stylish cinematography and general atmosphere of complete and utter weirdness. In similar fashion, the screenplay for "Malatesta's Carnival of Blood" is also a slipshod effort, with little connective tissue to make sense of what exactly is going on (even the main characters' arrival at the carnival is barely elucidated, making it somewhat confusing as to why they are there in the first place)--and yet again, it doesn't really matter, because the film is more a mood piece than anything. Surreal visuals reign supreme, with creepy carnival props, underground halls of mirrors, silent movie theaters where the cannibal ghouls congregate to watch movies(!?)--the weirdness never ceases. The film's main character, Vena, leads the audience through the proceedings as she spends a hellish night in the amusement park searching for her missing brother, and the proceedings have an "Alice in Wonderland" sensibility about them. The actual nature of the villains here is also not totally explained, but their ghoulish appearance in slathered-on grey makeup manages to be effectively captured in the claustrophobic cinematography. In the end, the film doesn't really register as a narrative piece, but it succeeds magnificently as an otherworldly, nightmarish adventure that resembles a bad trip. 7/10.

Everything in this movie was awful...the plot, the directing, the lighting, the acting. As a fan of b-movies that are so bad theyre good, I couldn't see one good thing about this mess.

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.