Thursday, October 27, 2016

Horrors of October - Rifftrax Live!: Carnival of Souls



Rifftrax Live!: Carnival of Souls (2016)

Similar to when I reviewed the live riffing of ANACONDA two years ago by the Rifftrax crew, this will be my immediate impressions. Once again, Mike, Kevin and Bill took an important horror movie and tore it to shreds with a consistently funny script of barbs and one-liners. CARNIVAL OF SOULS is a genuinely good film in itself but its low budget nature and slow plot progression does allow it to be easily mocked. Additionally, if the trio can make you laugh at NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, they can also do the same with this one as well. The three really mined a lot out of the wooden supporting players such as a forever-staring maid but had an absolute field day with John Linden, the main heroine's very creepy next door neighbor who's the type of guy, according to Mike, who would pleasure himself to bad video game reviews. Probably my personal favorite joke was how they took an artsy edit from a gas station to a boarding house and had the direction-giving gas attendant saying to the heroine that she needs to, "take a left at the inky pool of darkness." My runner-up would be the camera-pull close-up of a stained glass kneeling man who begs, "Please sir, may I have some plot?" My biggest issue with the live show, however, is that Rifftrax used a colorized version of the film, which hinders the great B&W photography and creepy macabre of the picture. They probably did it to bring in a bigger crowd at what still is a less known horror film with modern audiences but it didn't seem to work as my theater was filled but in one of the smaller ones. As for the shorts attached to the main feature, I was profoundly confused and laughing a lot at the one where a dirty adult witch is given a bath by a little girl and was a little ho-hum with "Masks of Grass", another ACI film that a had very problematic image of an African-American boy wearing a "grassy Indian headdress".


FINAL REVIEW: 3 / 5

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