Blu-ray Review: Come To The Carnival, Stay For The Ghouls With “Malatesta’s Carnival Of Blood”

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The Norris family get jobs working at a seedy old carnival as a cover for searching for their missing son who disappeared after visiting said carnival. Eccentric manager Mr. Blood turns out to be a vampire while the evil owner, Malatesta, rules over a gaggle of ghastly ghouls who watch silent movies when they aren’t feasting on human flesh.

Shot in the early 1970’s, “Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood” tells the story of a nightmarish carnival. The production of the film culminated in a screening on Philadelphia’s South Street in a jury-rigged theater to a cast of twenty people, who mostly only saw through the screening because they had appeared in the film. By this time, the film’s director was broke and the film’s main producer was going through a bitter divorce so neither party followed through to see how widely the film was distributed. At the very least, “Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood” made it to San Francisco and a handful of deep south drive-ins before the film disappeared for nearly thirty years. The film’s director, Christopher Speeth, went on to disappear into doing work on a series of low visibility documentaries and short films. But, then a revival happened when a copy of Malatesta’s reappeared and the film was mentioned in ‘Nightmare USA,’ one of few books that succeeds at charting the history of low-budget horror films.

A former elementary school teacher, Speeth shot the film in the feverish summer of 1973 in Willow Grove, a suburb of Philadelphia. Part of Malatesta’s was partially shot in the basement of the bankrupt Wakoko Machine Parts Shop while the rest was shot at the dying Willow Grove Park, an amusement park that is now a shopping center. Many of the actors were off-Broadway actors who had mainly taken roles in the film to have enough money to last through the summer. Shot on 35mm, the film production was broke that Speeth could only afford one take wide angles for many of the shots. The FX department used squeaking dog toys and played symbols backwards to evoke spooky sounds.

I’m not sure how much significance to give Malatesta’s. The film was shot at a time before there were not much more than one or two zombie films. Speeth also claims he hadn’t seen “Night of the Living Dead,” which if that’s a true statement, makes me impressed. But to listen to Malatesta’s screenwriter, Werner Liepolt, discuss the film makes one lose faith in the film. Malatesta is Liepolt’s only IMDB credits. Liepolt has said ridiculously pompous things about the film like the film is “American grotesquery” and that the carnival in the film works due to motifs of death and resurrection. Liepolt also claims the film is an attempt to adapt the Sawney Bean story, which Wes Craven would later claim his own in “The Hills Have Eyes.” Here’s what you need to know about Liepolt’s script, the script for Malatesta’s was thrown out halfway through filming and the tarot reader, Sonja, who Liepolt lovingly named after his mother, became a cross-dressing bisexual. You might be tempted to read this review so far to suggest that I don’t think Malatesta’s does not hold much power as a film. Malatesta’s does, but as one of the film’s art directors points out, the film is only as good as it because the film is as constrained, as desperate, and as low-budget as it was.

Why do you want to see Malatesta’s? Here’s what you can see:

• 1 upside down swinging car wrapped in orange cellophane
• 1 transvestite fortune teller
• 1 pasty eyed carnival worker with a hook hand
• 1 eye impalement
• 1 dwarf in a house of mirrors sequence
• 1 roller coaster decapitation
• 1 old-fashioned trapped-in a trailer and surrounded by ghouls sequence
• 1 corpse on a ferris wheel
• 3 people eaten by ghouls
• 2 trippy carnival sequences
• 1 foreboding French dwarf who speaks mostly in riddles
• 1 woman bound to a table, and
• 1 hypodermic injection

Malatesta’s opens with the introduction of Mr. and Mrs. Norris (Paul Hostetler and Besty Henn), who have just arrived at a carnival for reasons that neither are explained nor understood. I’ve read, though, that the Norris family are supposed to be investors in the carnival.

Vena Norris (Janine Carazo), the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Norris, plays the film’s heroine and has neither the presence nor strength of character to carry the film. Vena commences a relationship with Kit (Chris Thomas), who operates rides for the carnival.

Early in the film, the Davis family, who are visiting the carnival, disappear in a sudden and unmemorable way after being attacked by the ghouls. (And for the purposes of this review, we will call them ghouls even though they’re really zombies. Why? Because they’re billed as ghouls).

Before we know it, Mrs. Norris really wants to leave the carnival because she claims the place is evil. Why Mrs. Norris thinks this, we are never quite sure.

Kit and Vena carry on a secret rendezvous pursued by the hook-handed Mr. Bean (Tom Markus) and Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey). The film attempts to create a love triangle with Vena who must choose between Kit and Johnny (Paul Townsend), but this triangle does not work because Johnny is not seen until the last tenth of the film. And then the triangle really does not work because Kit is killed.

While Vena is pursued by Mr. Bean, Mr. and Mrs. Norris are cornered into its trailer by a pack of carnival ghouls. Eventually, Mr. and Mrs. Norris escape the trailer but are devoured by ghouls.

By the time Johnny arrives, Vena has been captured by the carnies and Mr. Blood tells Johnny that the Norris family died in a trailer fire. The carnies also propose the idea of flesh eating to prolong life to Johnny and he does not seem necessarily disturbed by that.

With Johnny none the wiser, Mr. Blood withdraws blood from Vena (which confused me because I thought he was a flesh eater, not a blood drinker. And if he’s a blood drinker, then isn’t he a vampire?).

There’s a weird and memorable scene where Vena comes upon the corpse of her dead father and rubs his hand over her head. I won’t try to give that image additional weight by comparing it to something, I think a clear visual of that image will suffice here.

The film ends with evil winning, the ghouls going crazy, and Malatesta riding on carnival swings like some type of crazy but triumphant king.

What is the sum of all this effort? A film that manages to find a handful of memorable visuals and depict a world of cruelty, grotesquery, and oddities. Did Speeth really make Malatesta, a creepy and effective film about zombies, without having seen “Night of the Living Dead?” I very much want to give him this credit. I very much want to like this film. I am enamored by my mental image of Speeth half-mad and half-starved in the height of the summer in 1973 shooting Malatesta with off-broadway actors in the basement of the Willow Grove Amusement Park. Malatesta is always described as a film about a carnival, but it may be one of the best horror films of the early 1970s – a depiction of how the acid trips of the ’60s went sour and led into the death and disaster of some other world.

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