Mini-Review: Carnival of Souls (1998)

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Dirs. Adam Grossman (and Ian Kessner)

The late nineties in my mind seemed to have an obsession with evil clowns and ringmasters, circuses and carnivals places you'd likely encounter something nasty rather than just throwing up on the rollercoaster. I remember an arcade game I sadly never got to play, the scrolling shooter CarnEvil (1998). KISS had their reunion album based on a "Psycho Circus", and at some point the Insane Clown Posse became a legitimate cult born from the Juggalo consciousness. Baring in mind Carnival of Souls is about pretty serious subject matter, which I don't want to trivialise, you have to wonder if some people had really bad experiences about carnival rides and some really slimy clowns working in the circus back then. Technically, this is a remake of the 1962 cult film of the same name. Both are drastically different aside from the type of ending they share, and I need to see the original film again. Wes Craven is immensely varying for me, (possibly?) described as having the trajectory of a narcoleptic on a trampoline in terms of his films high and low qualities, made worse by the fact that I don't like The Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or Scream (1996), so having him merely presenting this film has no interest. The only real draw of this film is remaking the original in the form that, from its DVD cover, it looks like you're getting Hellraiser, late nineties-style, mixed with a heavy metal mentality. Said cover doesn't really suggest what Carnival of Souls actually is.

Alex Grant (Bobbie Phillips) has been traumatised since childhood by the murder of her mother by child molester and carnival worker Louis Seagram (Larry Miller). An encounter with him when she grows up into an adult leads to a series of disorientating events where reality is completely disjointed for her. Chronology and place is liable to switch, and she believes Louis is stalking her despite the fact he may no longer exist. A carnival, near the bar her late mother owned and she kept onto, proves to be an ominous site and she occasionally sees horrifying, fleshy demons that no one else could see. The film is bad. Tired and bored. It's the perfect example of how a "mindbender" film, which un-anchors chronology, place and perception, is done badly and sloppily. Someone can argue a film like David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006) is pretentious, but its design in distorting the concept of reality is still a masterpiece in craftsmanship. The best films in terms of design, placing the actual content to the side for another debate, are those which usually greatly divide audiences, where you are as lost as the protagonist and feel every sensation in terms of the distortion. The shifts in time in Carnival of Souls are laboured, trying to keep the viewer on their toes but with no sense of forcing you to be in the protagonist's shoes. It's like a generic blueprint, or a crude drawing with obvious flaws, being compared to a perfect illustration which weaves every part together. When it tries to include scares into its narrative as well, it feels pathetic and signposted, knowing the scare will happen, and that its actually not scary despite the prosthetics, making it lame instead. It's cheap jump scares with abrupt pop-ups by fleshy demons, and the actually story never goes anywhere as well. With this tone to the film throughout its narrative, it really starts to test one's patience.

Visually it looks flat, flat in a way of a TV movie which doesn't take any interest in the visual quality of the material as its being depicted onscreen, especially one that was originally designed to go to the cinema. On a positive note it also points to the fact that the last years of the nineties, which I thought could still be contemporary, are very much of their era, not in that they've dated badly, but that aesthetically even 1999 feels like a different decade. Looking back at it, even at moments of cringe worthy pop culture, is inherently fascinating even with a film like this that is very limited in its locations and narrative. However that does not defend how bland the film actually looks. Bland is the perfect way to describe it all baring some early computer effects. Bland is the perfect way to describe the entire film. The story, despite its serious content, never grabs you and when the ending comes about it has no effect. The result is completely unemotional, and with its carnival aesthetic it squanders it for bad drama and riffing on the demons of Hellraiser pointlessly. It presents nothing interesting and is completely forgettable, a scrap of an idea that drastically needed a great amount of craft on it to make it work. It needed to be at least a cheesy film about creepy clowns and where even the candy floss is suspicious, not something that tries to be extremely serious but is so unknowing about the level of quality needed to make it work.

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