Reviewed By-Sean Patrick Dolan
Director:  Alan Rudolph
Cast:  Andrew Pine, Manuela Theiss, Sherry Alberoni, Gyl Roland, Chuck Niles

Simone (Manuella Theiss), Sheri (Sherry Alberoni), and Corrine (Gyl Roland)  are driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to star in a show on the strip that their agent, Derek (Chuck Niles), has booked for them.  They decide to take a shortcut through the desert and the car inevitably breaks down.  The next morning they are "rescued" by a charming young man named Andre (Andrew Pine).  He introduces them to his "menagerie"- a dozen or so women he has captured along the deserted highway and chained to wooden posts.  Andre believes he is a ringmaster and that he is training his "animals" for a performance sometime in the future.  He even takes the women out to exercise, which he accomplishes by linking them all together chaingang style and whipping them from atop a wooden lookout post as they are forced to walk in circles around it.  When a women tries to escape or otherwise proves herself to be "untrainable", she is taken out of the barn and introduced to one of the real animals Andre keeps, a lion, and something even stranger which he keeps locked in a shed near the very back of his property.

The girls are missing for several days and Derek begins to worry, so he reports them missing to the police and then goes out searching for them himself.  Meanwhile, Andre realizes that one of the girls, Simone, bares quite a resemblance to his mother who ran out on him and his father ten years ago.  Andre logically decides that she must be his mother and that she has returned to him after all this time.  He tells her all about how hard it has been to run the place since she left, especially after the military tried to force them off their land in order to conduct nuclear testing there.  He makes cryptic references to his father's "accident" and that he is "being cared for".  Simone takes advantage of Andre's mental breakdown and belief that she is his mother in order to plan an escape for her and the other women.  Her attempt is nearly successful, as she has already freed half of the girls before Andre arrives thwart it. By this time Derek has finally found a sheriff bright enough to track down the only property in the middle of nowhere that the girls could have disappeared to, but one of the few escaping girls has opened the shed and released the thing that has been lurking in it the whole film . . . .  


I watched the film under the US reissue title "Barn of the Naked Dead", which led me to expect a completely different type of film, quite possibly in the genre of sexploitation.  The title turned out to be a complete misnomer, as there is no nudity whatsoever and not much gore either.  But as often happens, while looking for one thing I stumbled upon something else that turned out to be almost as good.  Low production values, a psychedelic soundtrack, and a cheesy mutated monster round out a bizarre plot and truly amateurish acting to make Nightmare Circus a true "classic" of the drive-in era.  Andrew Pine turns in an at times hilarious performance as the nutcase Andre.  In just one memorable scene we see him entering the barn in full ringmaster's garb and barking to a nonexistent audience of spectators.  Nightmare Circus would have been unsuccessful as an exploitation film alone because it is not sophisticated enough in its premise or its execution to even raise serious questions of misogyny, although it would likely still piss off a theater full of feminists.  Fortunately, the introduction of a monster created by the government's nuclear testing added that extra ridiculous element that kept the film from being just another oddball exploitation flick.  The ending is pure schlock- the police arrive just a few minutes too late to prevent the monster from massacring the entire barn full of women.  They conclude that it must have been the lion who did all the damage, as it was wandering around loose and had to be shot by an officer when they arrived.  The credits roll as we see the monster shambling about in the background as the police in the foreground get in their cars and drive away.  Director Alan Rudolph went on to a long and relatively successful career, including 2002's The Secret Lives of Dentists.  Of Andrew Pine, it can also be said that he has enjoyed a career that has been . . . well, long.       

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