Carnival of Blood (1970)

Brooklyn’s favourite amusement park, Coney Island, is struck by a series of gruesome murders. It appears someone’s suffering from a case of highly violent misogyny and has a bit of a taste for mutilation and organ-stealing. Ambitious young assistant attorney Dan (Martin Barolsky) starts obsessing about the case – and his futile attempts at solving it by going to the carnival – so much, it puts his relationship with his artist girlfriend Laura (Judith Resnik) under quite some pressure. Laura has good contacts to Coney Island, too, for she’s good friends with mild-mannered dart-throwing booth owner Tom (Earle Edgerton). Tom has just hired a new helper, a perpetually angry, mentally handicapped, hunchbacked guy going by the highly unfortunate moniker of “Gimpy” (Burt Young, in his very first movie role, working as “John Harris”). Given his disposition and the usual habits of horror films, “Gimpy” is clearly our main suspect, but is he really going to be the killer?

Nobody watching Carnival of Blood will be terribly surprised to hear that its writer/director/producer Leonard Kirtman was mostly working in the porn biz afterwards, apparently sometimes under the pretty wonderful name of “Leo the Lion”, but most often as Leon Gucci (of the Hoboken Guccis, I assume). The film often has that distinctive vibe typical of porn filmmakers of the time doing horror or other non sex-based genres of being structured around sex scenes that somebody simply forgot to add. So there’s quite a bit of pointless dragging of feet in this one, with rather a lot of scenes certainly ending not in any sort of climax and indeed going nowhere slowly. Worst of those are our regular visits with the local fortune teller (Kaly Mills), foreseeing doom, of course, that just go on and on and on into eternity.

To be fair, there is a narrative reason why the film is showing all of the victims are visiting her, but that doesn’t make the scenes themselves any easier to get through, particularly since Kirtman really isn’t good enough of a director to make this repetitive business at least look interesting.

I do think it is worthwhile getting through Carnival’s copious amount of slow bits, however, for while our host certainly isn’t much of a stylist, he makes up for this lack with a lot of fascinating, basically documentary material that shows early 70s Coney Island in all its seediness and somewhat glorious loudness. Kirtman isn’t so much creating an interesting place for what on a plot level amounts to a US giallo to take place in, he’s rather shooting it like a documentary filmmaker would, leading to a film with a striking sense of place, if one often edited with a sledgehammer.

At least some of the acting is pretty worthwhile too, Young going method on a pretty problematic stock horror movie character type, and finding some genuine human core in it, mostly working opposite Edgerton and his similar if cornier and less intense performance to at least somewhat fascinating effect. Let’s not talk about our supposed leads.

Add to this a bit of preposterous and therefore awesome gore that would have been too subtle for Herschel Gordon Lewis, but was probably rather shocking for at least a part of the audience at the time when this went into the cinemas, and you have a film that’s at least interesting as a – exploitation-typical – mix of the crude, the boring, the fascinating, put inside of a time capsule that basically reeks of the past as indeed another country.