LeonLouisRicci You Can Hire a Circus and Their Performers Pretty Cheap (they work for peanuts) and B-Movie Schlock Meisters didn't Hesitate to do just that and Pad Their Otherwise Slim and Shallow Plots of Horrors Under the Big Top. In this one that Pales in Comparison to the Excellent Circus of Horrors (1960), the Main Attraction is Joan Crawford in Her Next to Last Movie, History has Confirmed it should have been the Last. If You are Seeking Out Low-Budget Crawford from this Period Forget This and See Strait Jacket (1964).Here after a Nifty Opening with a Clever Introduction to the Title, and the First Gory Murder (there will be no more Gore), Virtually Nothing of Note is Left in this Clunker. Unless You have Masochistic Tendencies or like to Make Fun of Others Suffering in Their Craft, this is Only of Interest to Crawford Completist, B-Movie Fans, Insatiable Horror Enthusiasts and those Yearning for the Days when the Circus had Animals.To Nail this Coffin Shut is yet Another Joan Crawford Movie where She is a Love Magnet to a Studly Type about 40 Years Younger and if that doesn't get Your Cringe Factor Cranking than You are Immune to Cringe Inducement.

utgard14 Campy horror-thriller starring that grand diva of melodrama Joan Crawford. The plot's about a series of gruesome murders at a circus run by Joan. The opening scene of a tightrope walker being impossibly hung by his own high-wire sets the stage for a schlocky horror film. All of the death scenes are great. Perhaps the funniest was Michael Gough's death. The true horror, though, comes not from the grisly death scenes. It comes from seeing Joan Crawford, over sixty years old at this time, romancing half-her-age Ty Hardin. Sexy Diana Dors is fun to watch. She has a hilarious catfight with another circus performer. In all honesty it's not a bad movie of its type. I think because Hollywood legend Joan Crawford is the star, some people go into this in a state of mourning for her career rather than enjoying this for the cheesy horror movie that it is.

rooster_davis I feel sorry for Joan Crawford when I see her in a movie like this. Whether she was playing a great part or something awful, she threw herself into the role completely. When the part was great we got something superb like Mildred Pierce... when the part was dumb we got something like this. It's so pathetic watching her play this ridiculous role so seriously. I do have to wonder whether it was her idea to have her decidedly older character throw around so many sexual innuendos as she did...I'll give this movie a 4 only because the scenes where Joan Crawford and Ty Hardin are expressing 'attraction' are so amazingly bizarre to watch. First though, I want to know how the directory on my DISH TV gives this thing 3 stars out of 4 - and gives Dear Heart with Glenn Ford and Geraldine Paige the same score???!!!! Dear Heart is a brilliant adult romantic comedy/drama for intelligent people, and this stinker is a low-buck clunker made to let Joan show us she can still come on to younger men. Anyhow - this movie is a howl. Joan manages to slip in some dirty humor, like when someone mentions that she said she was asleep when a murder happened. "I said I was in BED!" she replies. We get it. Frankly I don't even want to THINK about that scene. I don't, I don't, I don't.Why did she (like some other older women) do her hair up in a style that made the top of her head look like a sewing basket? The hair all stretched tight and then bundled into bun shapes on top. Joan had a decent figure yet for a 62 year old, why did she feel the need to style her hair like that? It looks awful and emphasizes her age, not her figure. I think she should have dyed it dark and done it in a more conservative style.Seeing Ty Hardin insist "I'm crazy about you!" to a Joan Crawford nearly double his age must have been a huge ego boost for her, but ewww! Her face was as hard and angular as an anvil by this point - correction, an anvil with a sewing basket on top.To think that this great actress had starred in the brilliant "Mildred Pierce" not that many years earlier, and now she was reduced to being a cradle-robbing head of a circus, it's just hard to fathom. This movie is not good in any way other than the macabre fascination of watching an old broad play on equal footing with a guy far, far too young to ever be interested in someone like her! I really believe that either this was written for or sought after by Crawford to let her show us that she was still hot to trot. Hey, she was a great actress with lots of super roles, but this was just 'berserk'.

Michael_Elliott Berserk (1967) ** (out of 4) Joan Crawford runs a circus, which is being stalked by a murderer. I've been wanting to check this film out for quite some time due to the fact that material like this is certainly below Crawford's talent and after watching this and Trog I must compare her to Bela Lugosi in the fact that even though the material is pretty bad she, like Lugosi, still gave her all. Director Jim O'Connolly doesn't give the film any motion as it feels like the film is a complete stand still from start to finish. There's no energy, no excitement and the mystery of who the killer is gets quite boring very early in the film. Outside of Crawford you do get a good performance from Michael Gough who overacts as usual but it's still nice to see him. When the killer is eventually identified, the performance by this person is so over the top that you can help but scream with laughter. What follows isn't any better.