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Freaks (1932)

Freaks on the IMDb
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Warner Brothers.  Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, directed by Tod Browning.  I was pretty excited when this one came out on DVD as for me it was replacing a very grainy home-made tape taken off the television in the late 1980's.  Has an excellent documentary Freaks: Sideshow Cinema, which includes mini-bios of each of the "Freaks" playing in the movie.  This is very dark stuff and the climax holds up as possibly the creepiest and dare I say, scariest, scene in any American movie of this age.  I just wish Olga Baclanova and Harry Earles didn't have such heavy accents, you really have to listen carefully to every word they say and they both play very important dialogue-heavy parts.  This DVD also has commentary by David J. Skal, author of The Monster Show, a book that I enjoyed enough to read three times.

 

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