Meet ringmaster Dr. Deimos Moreau, his daughter Venus, and his sons Apollo, Janus, and Trinculo, a traveling family who tour thier underground adult cabaret act, The Midnight Horror Show, around Britain.
Venus and Apollo can't stop bickering. Trinculo, who wears his clown make-up per entangle to hide his scars, is desperately trying to start a relationship with a girl he's just met. Janus, who is either unbalanced or his ventriloquist dummy really does talk to him, has secretly signed with a talent agent and is looking to break out of the family business and make it big. To make matters worse, the rich father of one of the families previous victims has sent a detective/hitman to track them down and kill them slowly.
Originally titled "The Midnight Horror Show", featuring a fairly decent theme song ("The Midnight Horror Show", and featuring repeated references to The Midnight Horror Show, the UK distributors of this movie decided that "Theatre of Fear" would make a better title for this movie about the disturbed family who run The Midnight Horror Show.
On the subject of distribution, this movie was released direct to DVD on the 25th of April 2014; by October the same year, brand new copies of the film were available in Poundland's halloween range. That tells you everything you need to know about the movie's success, but does it deserve better?
Plotwise it comes across as a very dark soap opera, in that rather than one story, there are several things happening concurrently to various characters. It's an interesting approach for a movie, but ultimately it leaves the film feeling unfocused. I'm not even sure who we're supposed to be routing for, or if the film makers were going for comedy.
The Midnight Horror Show itself really doesn't seem all that horrific, or even interesting. Truth be told it comes across as a hokey variety show, filled with unengaging performers. I was struck by the ordeneryness of the acts, especially given the family name of Moreau; why use that name (for a doctor no less) and not have a single Manimal in sight‽
On the acting side, only Lee Bane as Janus is noteworthy, with most of the cast speaking in a very unnatural "hiding my accent" way, which leads to a lot of over-pronunciation putting me in mind of most of the child cast of the first couple of Harry Potter movies.
Like the show-within-the-film at the movies centre, Theatre of Fear fails to live upto its promise, and delivers an unfocused and dull experience.
Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.
At the end of October 2013 I decided that all of my 2014 movies would be purchased from Poundland, and began buying up horror movies, to ensure I would have enough come October 2014.
In March 2014 I took a part time job at Poundland.
In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.
I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:
All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.
In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or management.
May you re-think the poundland horrors next Shocktober?
ReplyDeleteI never intended to make it every year, but yes, ill be dropping back down to the usual small number from there.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, if I wasn't trying to find so many £1 films, I would probably have never picked up "Rage", and I really enjoyed that.