She Freak (1967)

How sad is this?

Admirable film.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Someone had the brilliant idea to remake Todd Browning's "Freaks" in an updated version.Of course, there were two huge problems with that. First, by 1967, the Freak Show had all but disappeared, falling victim to political correctness making the display of people with birth defects and the fact most carnivals found rides to be more economical than hiring said people. So really, by 1967, there were no freaks to be found, save one little person.Second, no one involved in this movie could act worth a darn.Further complicating matters is that there was not 83 minutes worth of movie here. So they filled it out with footage of people taking down and putting up the circus.The real problem is, unlike the other fetishists here, Brownings original material was really awful, and it didn't deserve a remake. Browning was trying to shock with his images, the plot was just an excuse to hang the freak footage on.Here they had no freak footage, so they were hanging material on an empty line.

Celebrated "Nudie Cutie" producer and exploitation film genre pioneer from Alabama David F Friedman's labour of love, SHE FREAK concerns a waitress from an unspectacular café in Texas who joins a traveling carnival hoping to find a rich man to provide her with the finer things in life, unlike her mother whose existence was unfulfilled and miserable. She indeed finds her man, invested in the carnival, Steve St. John (Bill McKinney, whose notoriety derives from making Ned Beatty squeal like a pig before raping him in the backwoods in DELIVERENCE), and this woman, Jade Cochran (Claire Brennen) exploits their marriage by allowing the newfound power he gives her to mistreat the workers, particularly the freaks she finds repulsive, paying a dear price for her misdeeds. Friedman's movie dedicated to carnivals and Tod Browning's FREAKS was for me a tedious bore, but it does give us a look inside the construction of the a Bakersville, California carnival, showing the hired help breaking down and setting up tents and rides, the locals who attend them arriving with happy smiles. Claire Brennen is featured prominently in the film often with men eyeballing her as she shakes her ass and shows off her curves. Many might recognize Claude Earl Jones (the café owner who promises Jade that she will pay for her sins) from lots of television and the made for TV horror classic, DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW. Lee Raymond is Blackie Fleming, the "ferris wheel foreman" Jade has sex with while Lynn Courtney is the stripper Pat "Moon" Mullins who befriends Cochran before the power goes to the new Ms. St. John's head. The ending, where the freaks get their revenge, is right out of FREAKS, practically a shot-for-shot remake of that infamous scene. While I found the plot uneventful and plodding, the make-up from Harry Thomas is wonderfully grotesque when Jade gets her makeover as a result of her tyranny.

A truly diabolical 60's remake of the legendary Tod Browning movie Freaks. Unlike the original film, this ultra low budget affair does not feature real 'freaks'. Also, unlike the original version, this film does not feature anything that can be vaguely described as interesting. An alarming percentage of the running time seems to be spent watching people putting up and taking down tents and other fairground attractions. We have seemingly endless scenes showing fairground rides and people frequenting side-stalls. We have a hugely unerotic striptease and many other sequences so tedious my mind has blocked them out as a suppressed memory. The acting talent and production values are nil. This movie must've been shot in a couple of days tops. The she-freak of the title only rears her ugly head in the last few seconds of this dreck and, needless to say, it isn't worth the wait.This is exploitation cinema at its worst. It exploits the viewer in such a way that it promises something and delivers less than nothing. This is as close to a non-movie as you can get. It's so bad I would wish it on my worst enemies.Absolute gash.

_She Freak_ is certainly one of the more accessible of Friedman's post-HG Lewis movies. Obviously intended to target drive-ins, it lacks the more objectionable (and usually dull) `adult' material of his other pictures, and spends more time on the plot. Other strengths include actors that know their lines and location footage (at a carnival) that offers a bit more visual diversity than is usual in the extreme low-budget 60's field.That said, however, the film is deeply flawed and far from a classic. It is frequently billed as a `remake' of Tod Browning's _Freaks_, which is true to an extent, but not in the way one would hope. Clearly the writer took the concept of a selfish carnival girl who is punished by the freaks for her ill-treatment of one of their number and ran with it. Unfortunately, it did not inspire him to particular heights. The most notable difference between this film and its inspiration is the aspects of carny life upon which they focus. _Freaks_ focused on the title characters – showing their lives and loves, how sideshow freaks were people with feelings who banded together against a world that despised them. _She Freak_, by contrast, seems mostly concerned with the people behind the scenes: the concessioners and `ride boys' and the Grips (or whatever their called in carny talk) that set up and tear down the big show. Something like 10 minutes of footage is sweaty guys working with tent poles, so if that's your thing…As far as sideshow acts are concerned: there's a coochy-dancer (who goes `as far as the law allows,' evidently in a bible-belt state), a sword-swallower, a snake charmer and a fortune-teller. Even the one real `freak' of the film, the unfortunate `Shorty' the midget, gets very little screen time and never performs whatever act he is supposed to have.The other glaring flaw is the character development. The main character, Jade, starts the movie as a bitch, then is re-introduced as a sympathetic character with high hopes, then spends the rest of the movie bouncing back and forth. It got so bad that I started to regard the movie as a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale, with the `bad' Jade progressively screwing up the aspirations of the `good' Jade. But, unlike Stevenson's story, there is no explanation for Jade's dual personality, and no way to predict which side of her would emerge. A more interesting take, had the writer and director been up to the challenge, would have been to portray Jade as starting out nice, but gradually becoming `jaded' (sorry, couldn't help that pun) over the course of events and hard knocks in the carnival, until she went too far and had to be destroyed. Frankly, the `crime' for which she is punished (firing Shorty) does not fit the punishment she earns, and there are other characters in the film that have far more justifiable grievances than the freaks do.One interesting hallmark of the low-budget Friedman approach deserves note. The extended silent sequences, in which the audience is treated to musical montages of images that are supposed to suggest action. Aside from the aforementioned set-up, tear-down sequences, the entire courtship of Jade and her prospective husband is handled in this way. Up until his last two or three scenes, pretty much the only thing this actor says is `Hello.' On the whole, this is actually a good thing. Overall, it's worth it for exploitation completists, and is a watchable film, but not generally recommended.