"It is I! Six hundred and sixty...uh...LINE!"
Gather around children and I'll tell you a cautionary fable. There once was a handsome young film reviewer. He was very sad because recently he had only been watching good movies and he was tired of writing about how much he enjoyed films. He looked at his DVD collection and saw Doom, but he didn't watch that. He was sad, not masochistic. Just when he was about to give up hope, a happy thought came to him: "Wait, there was a really bad horror musical made by Darren Lynn Bousmann, director of most of the Saw films except the first one which was actually good! And didn't he make another, even worse film?" A wave of his magic internet and he was watching the film, titled The Devil's Carnival. And then the boy died of Badmovieitis. The moral of the story is "Be careful what you wish for." and also "Holy hell, does Darren Lynn Bousmann make bad movies".
In truth, I have an interesting relationship with Bousmann's first attempt at horror musical theatre: Repo! The Genetic Opera, because, as bad a film as it is and as ridiculous a project as it certainly, certainly is, about twenty minutes into it, I started to really dig it. Though admittedly, that may have been due to the delirium caused by seeing Anthony Head in a role about as diametrically opposed to the "Nescafe Gold Guy" as you can possibly get.
"Think you can steal my schtick and get away with it, do you, Kris Marshall?"
Also, I get double points for super-involved British advert humour.
Repo exists now as a film that I delight in showing people so that we can revel in the absurdity of it together, but when I try and watch it on my own (and I have tried), I never make it to the end because the film is just so awful.
So I went into The Devil's Carnival with cautious optomism. I didn't think for a moment that the film would be good, but I had precedent to believe that it might be insane and ridiculous enough to be fun.
The plot of the movie follows three "sinners", a kleptomaniac, a girl who's main crime is naiveity and a predeliction for bad boys, and a man who is in hell for, I kid you not, grieving too much over his dead son. Each of them must navigate a horror movie version of an Aesop's fable, (The Dog and Her Reflection, The Scorpion and the Frog, and The Grief and His Due, respectively) in an attempt to redeem themselves and learn a lesson about...life? Death? The afterlife? The film never really bothers to explain.
The plot is, amazingly (given the source material is Aesop), paper thin, evidenced by a ludicrous fifty-five minute runtime, and serves very little purpose in a film which clearly cares more about its stylised "goth circus" atmosphere than any story or character that might populate it. That being said, the look of the film is quite impressive and it is enjoyable to see demons and zombies dolled up in circuswear.
I might even call it novel had I not seen the similar if much superior stageshow Circus of Horrors.
Listing the various things that don't work in this film would take too long (though it would certainly be cathartic), however, mention must be made of the music. This is a musical and, if you haven't guessed already from previous entries in this blog, I am a big fan of musicals, both classic and experimental varieties. Now, Repo had many terrible songs and often the lyrics of the good ones were laughable, but the good songs were pretty good and if you asked me, I could probably start singing a few of them off the top of my head right now.
So...no-one? No-one's going to ask?
In The Devil's Carnival, however, the soundtrack is not just forgettable, it's painful! There is one song - one in twelve - that was passable (and I'm being generous there) and the rest are either sung by an atonal chorus line or by individual singers (and presumably friends of Bousmann) who seem to really want to bring the concept of "Hell" alive with their singing voices.
What truly perplexes me about this movie, though, is that if you ignore imdb's viewer rating (which is low) and look at the critical reception of the film, it actually fares quite well. Critics have called it "darkly, enchantingly comedic" and "subversive". And I'm forced to ask: "Was I watching the same movie?"! It's dark, yes, mostly because the director seems to have a phobia of proper lighting. It's enchanting, sure, because you have to give it your full concentration just to follow the weak plot (which I still had to double-check on Wikipedia afterwards to make sure I was getting it). I agree, it's comedic, in that the writers think that there's enough substance to this franchise to warrant a sequel. And fine, it's subversive, in as much as it rejects every tenet of "good" cinema to further what is clearly a pet project for Bousmann. But I don't think that's what those other critics meant.
Immediately after finishing watching The Devil's Carnival, I began making excuses for why it didn't strike me the same way that Repo: The Genetic Opera did. "Maybe," I thought, "It's because I was expecting it to be bad but also shocking and ridiculous. Maybe the reason I like Repo is because I didn't know what to expect when I first watched it." But this simply isn't the case. The film is hard to watch because the script is bad, the acting is worse and the music (again, in this musical), is diabolical. It isn't insane enough to be fun. It isn't gory (at all, a rare turn for Bousmann) to make it shocking. It doesn't look good enough to be truly mesmerising. The plot is too weak to be compelling.
Perhaps in time, this movie will prove to be somewhat like that other Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare: as I sit hubristically mocking this film for its failures, it will zoom past me in a blaze of cult popularity. More likely, I think, it will prove exactly like The Tortoise and the Hare: unrealistic, and a clear violation of the laws of nature.
That's a wrap.