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DVD (22)
Freaks is sumptuously produced, admirably directed, and no cost was spared. But Metro failed to realize that even with a different sort of offering the story still is important.
Director Tod Browning, one of the few truly individual directors in the U. S., is a specialist in horror.
If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer definitely has on its hands a picture that is out of the ordinary.
[VIDEO] In spite of the tremendous success he enjoyed with "Dracula" in 1931, Tod Browning's directorial career was effectively ruined after he made "Freaks" the following year.
Firmly out of its tree from start to finish, the campy performances and bonkers dialogue make for plenty of cherishably deranged moments.
The freaks are not the abnormally sized people in the movie but the evil people of the world who commit wicked deeds against their fellows. (TCM Greatest Classic Films)
To the horror movie, a genre he helped create, he brought a taste for Victorian melodrama and an understanding, which he must have gained in the circus, for the isolated lives of weird and deformed outsiders.
Freaks is one of Browning's more consistently fine films, a landmark still worth seeing.
Absolutely spine chilling Tod Browning classic horror film. "We will make you one of us." Yike!
The movie's influences can be found in nearly every conceivable corner of modern film.
Finally this cult touchstone is restored in a first-rate DVD edition from Warner.... The disc's extras offer everything you've always wanted to know about Freaks but were too weirded out to ask.
...drills into our hindbrain and jolts our atavistic response to the not-normal, then forces us to confront our prejudices and feel something -- revulsion, compassion, or surprise at the realization that those aren't mutually exclusive responses.
It has now achieved deserved recognition as a masterpiece.
Unclassifiable odd masterpiece.
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