cinema history class: she freak

Session: Get Your Freak On, Week 3
Movie: She Freak (1967)
Directed by Byron Mabe

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Bored with her dead-end life as a waitress in a greasy spoon in the middle of nowhere, Jade joins a travelling carnival. Ambitious and cunning, she sees a path to the top. Maybe she'll even be a star? Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
This was the third movie Keith showed us in this series, which he said would be films that build on or try to emulate the Tod Browning classic, Freaks. In the first week, we saw a pair of conjoined twins (who, by the way, had been in Browning's cast) working in a Vaudeville-type show. The second week featured an apparently haunted house that had former circus freaks living in its basement.

This is the first one which can really be said to be a rip-off of that 1932 film. The ending, and the way that ending and the beginning serve as bookends are all-too-obvious as ripoffs of that 1932 classic. And the main plot, centering on an ambitiously conniving woman who wants to marry for wealth, bears more than a passing similarity.

But the similarities end there. Freaks focused on, well, the Freaks. We see them going through their joined life, and the movie is designed, in part, to make the viewer feel for them. She Freak has no such ambition. To the extent that the freaks are there, they're little more than props. Their purpose is to serve justice to the main character. In fact, with the exception of Shorty (who, arguably, is not actually a freak), we don't even see the freaks until near the end, when they mete out justice. And that's one of the odd things about this movie that makes it seem very poorly done. With all the footage of the travelling carnival -- and there was a lot of it -- you'd think they would have included some shots of the freaks who would eventually be so important to the plot.

Of course, if you like footage of travelling carnivals, well this is the movie for you. The seemingly-endless filler montages of tents being set up, tents being pulled down, people enjoying rides... They're kind of interesting at first, and do a good job of orienting the viewer. But they become mind-numbing. And it seems that these sequences serve as a band-aid for a plot that wasn't fully developed.I kind of wish they had done more with the stories and characters, as this could have been a much better movie than it was.

Ratings:

Me: 6.5

Christina: 6.5

Dave: 9

Ethan: 6

Sean: 1 out of 4

Former Boss' Reaction:
To let y'all know, someone who used to be my boss says he will not watch movies made before 1980 -- except for Star Wars. I try to touch base with him about the movies we saw in class, and ask if he'd be interested in seeing them.

His reaction to She Freak: "As great as the title sounds, I'm going to have to stick with my 1980 & later rule."