Review: Carnival of Souls

Formerly at Epinions.com, written in 2011 in a really, really bad mood it seems. Or just telling it like it is?

 

Three girls’ reckless drag racing sees them and their car crash off a bridge. Candace Hilligoss, the only survivor of the accident leaves town to head for Utah (sounds vaguely like the beginning if “Psycho”, with a few changes here and there), where she becomes a church organist (like all good runaway drag racers, I guess). Moving into a boarding house she finds herself experiencing all manner of strange things; Ghostly apparitions (including one played by director Herk Harvey), times when it appears she is invisible to everyone around her, and a strange attraction to an abandoned carnival pavilion. Frances Feist is her landlady, and Sidney Berger is a strange boarder across the hall who has designs on the icy Hilligoss.

 

One of the last supposedly ‘great’ horror films I’d yet to track down, this low-budget (apparently less than $100,000) horror flick from Herk Harvey (apparently an industrial filmmaker by trade) gets universal praise. And usually I tend to agree with the praise of these supposedly ‘great’ horror films (Even “The Exorcist” earns my admiration, despite not being much fun to watch). Unfortunately, this one joins “I Walked With a Zombie” in the ‘I just don’t get it’ category.

 

Basically, the film’s a great big snore and I got very little at all out of it (Then again, neither did anyone involved. The film flopped and few if any involved had a film career beyond this one). This meagre-budgeted film is well-shot in B&W by Maurice Prather and has a great organ score by Gene Moore, but it’s as frightening as an episode of “Scooby-Doo” and dead-arse boring. It takes forever to go almost nowhere at all, and the acting style is typical of the acting one could find in many pre-“Night of the Living Dead” horror films, at least the low-budget ones without name stars. Frances Feist, as the landlady, in particular, is one of the worst actresses to have ever appeared in a horror film. Lead actress Hilligoss fares best, and even she’s a bit average. The worst thing about her is the inconsistency of her character. The girl we see at the beginning of the film drag racing, just doesn’t seem like the same girl we see in the rest of the film. It’s not just that she’s a church organist (and sadly she doesn’t play “Inna Gadda Da Vida”), her whole demeanour and personality just don’t fit with the character at the beginning. Also, as creepy as Sidney Berger is (and he sure is), Hilligoss’ lead character is quite unsympathetic, so it’s even harder to care.

 

One might argue that nothing really happens in a great horror film like “Repulsion” either, but that isn’t true, it’s just that a lot of it happened in the mind of one character. And that film was amazingly frightening, well-acted and enjoyable. Nothing happens in this film at all. It’s mostly just Hilligoss walking around and seeing things. That’s it. For about 80 minutes that seem twice as many. I mean, that’s not even a damn plot, is it? It’s a skeleton. The score, sound FX, and some of the overhead camera shots are bloody marvellous, as well as some creepy images, angles and shot compositions, but I was too bored to care, really. The people who praise this film must’ve watched it alone at midnight when they were half asleep and kept nodding off every now and then. It’s the only possible explanation, because sitting through the entire film without some kind of reprieve is pure torture. The ending (or non-ending) is not only entirely transparent, but it renders the entire film totally pointless. Absolutely without any point whatsoever. Some scenes have a horrifying nightmarish quality (such as the scene where Hilligoss appears to go unseen and unheard in a crowded department store- and it is batshit crazy and weird), but they are ruined by the rest of the film which is boring, uneventful, and tragically meandering. The screenplay is by John Clifford, and I use the term ‘screenplay’ loosely, as there’s barely anything going on here at all. If you like David Lynch’s experimental film “Eraserhead”, you might get something out of this, but I consider “Eraserhead” to be one of the worst films of all-time. This is better, but not by much.

 

God this was a waste of time! Of all the so-called ‘great’ horror films, this is the worst I’ve seen. It might’ve worked as a short film, though. I really am shocked that this one turned out so bad, given everyone else seems to think it’s one of the best horror films ever made (My favourites for the record are: “The Omen”, “Halloween”, “Child’s Play”, “Repulsion”, “The Haunting”, “Nosferatu”, and “Dawn of the Dead”, among others).

 

Rating: D