Review of Freaks (1932) by Hiatt N — 02 Sep 2012
Freaks has a strange thing going: despite some genuinely moving moments, the acting is, for the most part, quite terrible and cliche. That said, it's one of the greatest films I've ever seen.
The melodrama flies by at a hundred miles an hour, and we're thinking we must be watching a dramatic film, and then the ending. To this day, I've never seen anything quite like the ending to Freaks, and it's one of the most terrifying scenes ever put to film.
It's interesting, because Browning pulled some serious irony on his audience. People came to see Freaks expecting to see a bunch of freaks beating on 'normal' people. Well, Browning gave them that ... what he didn't say was that the 'normal' people would be in the wrong, and the movie would be spent developing the freaks as characters, so the horrifying ending would leave you more confused that you would expect from a pre-code horror film.
The film is by no means perfect. In fact, it's jam-packed with awkwardness, mistakes, bad acting, hackneyed script writing, and oddities. But none of that matters. This film goes off like a gunshot, over in what feels like three seconds, but it is a sad, funny, tender, short, ironic, important, visceral and shockingly scary masterpiece.
This review of Freaks (1932) was written by Hiatt N on 02 Sep 2012.
Freaks has generally received very positive reviews.
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