Director: Andy Palmer
Year: 2015
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Escaping from jail, several serial killers take up hiding in plain sight at a haunted house designed after their original criminal sprees and decide to torment the guests trapped inside, forcing those still alive to wonder how to stop them in order to escape the carnival alive.
Review:
This one here was quite the fun and enjoyable slasher. There’s a lot of solid work here with this one really managing to go for quite the fun amount of time here with this one really generating it’s best scenes here because it’s focus is on the number of maniacs on the loose. Putting the number at this high is quite a strong feat which is heralded along by the fact that the main location is a carnival funhouse that’s based around their actual crimes for the unsuspecting and totally disbelieving locals. That really makes for the film to go through a rather original feature in the first half of the kids going through the set-ups unaware they’re watching the actual killers recreating their crimes on victims as this is all assumed to be just an act with prosthetics and the various encounters here become all the more fun later on where their bodies are added to the attractions for the next round of contestants to witness which really adds to the deranged and demented atmosphere here.
Those attractions, from the taxidermist cutting up the bodies to the dentist drilling into people, the deranged clown ripping people to pieces, the cannibal cutting up and devouring them and the female joker running around maniacally slicing up bodies all makes for the absolutely crazy and frenetic experience that makes for quite a great running time throughout here. The strong sense of action carries nicely into the final half here with this one moving along into the general freak-off out of the people realizing the actions are real and scoring plenty of fun here with the whole idea of the carnival getting massacred in quick-shot kills by their encounters with the killers running loose as there’s a lot of fun brawls mixed into the action for a wholly enjoyable sense of fun throughout here that’s made all the better with the final’s fun use of realistic prosthetics for the gore effects here which is half the fun of these scenes alone which is yet another fun part to this one.
The cast here is a lot of fun and really helps hold this up. Scottie Thompson as Sheriff Kate is a truly standout cop here, logical and intuitive with enough character quirks to keep us on her side as she tries to escort them to safety inside the carnival. Jere Burns as Mental Manny, the ringleader of the psychos, is certainly imposing and threatening whenever he's on-screen but it's not often enough and he becomes sorely underutilized. Of the main group trapped inside, Matt Angel as Morgan and Renee Dorian as Laurie are the most interesting and fleshed out as they're likable, courageous and far more level-headed than their friends. Chasty Ballesteros as Christina and Sterling Sulieman as Jason are more one-note being sex-crazy hound-dogs which doesn't offer much of a chance to get to know them which doesn't manage to leave much of an impression but they're thankfully not annoying so they come off all right. Likewise, with Robert Englund in a glorified cameo and some fine character actors in here as well, this one manages to really hold up quite nicely in terms of acting prowess. These here all make this one quite a lot of fun and manage to hold it up over it’s one main flaw.
The one big issue with the film is the fact that there’s a somewhat uneven pace throughout here that drags this one out, which is felt in the first half as it takes way too long to finally decide to go to the carnival in the first place as there’s not a whole lot of worthwhile work done here to make them interesting in going to the show. This makes the film take a while to get going, and it’s quite fun once it does but that takes a while. The bumbling deputy also isn’t funny and becomes detrimental here in that it starts pointing towards how he graduated from the academy his stumbling around was that bad, and that really strikes a chord here since that is continuous throughout the film. It's a style that clashes wildly against the rest of the film and just doesn't belong here regardless of that here with the inability to offer any kind of laughs in here because it's so lame and unfunny. These scenes here really affect the film as a whole.
Overview: ****/5
Despite a few minor issues to be had here, this one still has way too many positives to really hold it back too much as there's a ton of fun to be had with this one. Give this one a chance if you're into these high-energy lighter-toned genre efforts or are interested in the concept behind the film, while those who don't care for this style of film should heed caution here.
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