Freaks Review

Freaks
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring:
Wallace Ford
Roscoe Ates
Olga Baclanova
Edward brophy
Harry Earles
Daisy Earles
(1932)

Based off the short story Spurs written by Tod Robbins. Browning hired real circus freaks to act out this macabre tale of the disturbing life behind the happy public circus life of the performers. The viewer will see real freaks exclaimed as "The Living Torso, A Living Skeleton, the singing siamese twins, pinheads and midgets.

When this movie first came out, many people, mainly women and children, were discouraged from seeing the film because of the harshness of the story's ending. Now it is considered a classic movie.

Freaks is a fantastic movie filled with the grotesque of human nature. Not the freaks themeselves, but the "normal" people that are involved. The acting in this film is very well done. You, the viewer, get the sense of what the circus people felt and said about the people who came to gawk at them. I highly enjoyed watching this movie and very pleased that Browning used "real freaks" to get the complete movies point across.

The main plot of the story is based on two "normal size" people, a man and a woman, who try to swindle money from a midget man. The midget man is well off, and the woman flatters her way into his life, marries him at a very strange wedding ritual and thinks she can get rid of "her little man" so she may marry her lover and be rich. The midget has an admirer though. The beautiful midget lady. She adores him, but could never see him hurt or angry, so she sacrifices her love for him so that he may marry the beautiful "normal size" woman.

What the "normal size" folks didn't think about is that the "freaks" can get around and hear things and they found out what these two were up to. So on the night of the plan to poison the midget, they come through the mud and rain to do their own revenge on the two. What happens to the two "normal" people is a revenge that they would never forget, and high justice.


Content Ratings:
violence: med.
Language: none
Sexual Contents: low
age appro: 13 and up