Psycho-Circus

Enjoyed this film which starts off with a very neat robbery on the London Bridge, in England and then the picture takes you to a Circus Community that has lots of wild animals and very creepy people. Christopher Lee appears in the film but very briefly, their are plenty of lions, tigers, elephants and plenty of people with hidden paths and deep dark secrets. There is a constant battle between a guy and his attractive gal who teases him with a lot of flirting with other men. This film will completely keep you guessing just how the film will end because of the many twists and turns it takes you on. This film would really be a good Halloween film even though it does not have any horror, just suspense. Enjoy.

I'm stunned by the low average (5.4) given to Circus of Fear by IMDb voters. I've just watched the 91-minute colour version put out on DVD by Blue Underground, and found it absorbing throughout.

My guess is that many of the reviewers have seen only the truncated 1965 American version (65 minutes); naturally, missing 26 minutes of a 91- minute film, one will see only a very imperfect version of what the filmmakers intended. To get a true sense of the film one has to have the uncut version.

Despite the advertisements of the time, which played up the film as a horror movie (cashing in on the fact that horror icon Christopher Lee was the star of the film), this is not a horror film. There are some frightening moments, but this is essentially a whodunit, and a fairly good one. The slight "horror" tinge to the film (with its hooded lion- tamer, murders by skillfully thrown knives, screaming circus starlets, vicious circus lions, etc.) add atmosphere, but the story remains a whodunit.

It's also a caper film, insofar as it opens with a well-filmed money truck heist in broad daylight on the Tower Bridge in London. (It was filmed on location for that part.) But there ends up being some kind of sinister and unclear connection between the heist and goings-on at a circus, and it takes the whole film to make clear exactly what the connection is.

Leo Genn is brilliant as the Scotland Yard detective. He has a smooth, beautiful, calm acting manner reminiscent of Herbert Marshall's, and is a joy to watch. The excellent dialogue he is given doesn't hurt. The movie also has good performances by a number of very good British and German actors of the 1960s (it was a German-English co-production).

Christopher Lee is good in the part of the hooded lion-tamer with an ambiguous past. He shows his ability to act in non-horror parts here.

The opening and closing theme music is good, with a 1960s British flavor, but the film itself has only incidental music, with many parts of the story unaccompanied. This works well for this type of film.

The colour photography is beautiful.

This movie is definitely worth more than a 7 out of 10. Maybe it's not quite worth an 8, but to compensate for the ridiculous 5.4 average, I give it an 8 anyway. That's less misleading than a 5.4. A 5.4 says, "Don't waste your time watching this movie", but this movie is very much worth watching, for Genn's performance alone, not to mention its other merits.

this movie proved to be a surprisingly effective spin on the then popular german genre of the "krimi": a series of films, often from edgar wallace source novels, which tend to defy the generic conventions of crime dramas by moving into horror, espionage, even sci-fi at times.

beginning with an energetically directed heist sequence, the film soon shifts gear and location, focussing on the machinations of circus folk, in particular the various affairs and double-dealings of a handful of seemingly innocent and not so innocent clowns, midgets, knife-throwers and lion tamers. the two stories are linked, but only about as much as the two stories in "psycho" are linked: one is there to purely to feed the other.

there are twists and turns galore in this film; perhaps a few too many to be entirely plausible. some of the dialogue scenes are a little stilted, too. however, john moxey's direction tends to keep things going quite well, with some surprisingly sophisticated and kinetic direction. (note, for example, the way the loop of gregor's whip hovers around mr big's head to symbolise his attempts to psychologically ensnare his blackmailer.)

performances are generally quite solid, including from the imported german cast (there presumably to keep west german krimi fans happy), and there are definitely a couple of standouts. klaus kinski is unintelligible a usual, especially as he's forever got a cigarette in his mouth, but his presence lifts the film quite a bit. christopher lee is the only crashing disappointment, as he doesn't appear until act two, he's in a mask for most of the film, and his russian accent wavers a little. he really has no definitive presence here, and it's not particularly his story. i'd also have recast a lot of the police officers for a modern audience, as although they're quite old-fashioned (think dixon of dock green or pc 49), their dialogue would suit the stars of "the sweeney" with little adjustment. but then, in a microcosm of the characteristically unusual, perhaps a little grounding in sanity isn't so bad!

overall, this was a surprisingly effective film. i've only seen the restored 91-minute version that's available on dvd, so perhaps a slightly shorter version with some of the duller dialogue scenes cut down would hold the attention a bit better. (can't be as bad as the p;d 65-minute version, though, even if the film does hold up okay in b&w.) but this is definitely a film worth seeing, especially if you want a decent introduction to the world of the krimi. just don't see it if you want a big christopher lee vehicle -- he had more presence in "dracula", and he was only in six minutes of that!

As almost everybody has already noted, "Circus of Fear" is not a horror movie, despite the title, the advertising and the presence of Christopher Lee (in a secondary role). It's a cross between a crime caper and a whodunit. And as soon as you get over your initial reservations, it turns out to be an engrossing film that keeps you guessing all the way to the end. The story is full of strange, shady, secretive and suspicious characters, but the revelation of the killer's identity still comes as a shock (to me at least - it blew my theory away!). Apart from the sometimes overemphatic music score, this 40-year-old movie still holds up today. And who wants to miss any opportunity of seeing Klaus Kinski playing....Klaus Kinski? This guy only needed a cigar, a few close-ups and two or three lines of dialogue to look creepy! (**1/2)

This film is living proof of the wonders a stunning-looking print on DVD can do to a film: when I first saw it (in a dubbed version on late-night Italian TV), I had felt it was nothing more than average and dismissed it somewhat. Truth be told, a few weeks prior to this I had watched the other Christopher Lee/John Moxey film - THE CITY OF THE DEAD (1960) - by way of VCI's exemplary DVD edition, and perhaps I compared it unfavorably to this minor horror classic.

I had long known Blue Underground were preparing a SE and I was not sure it was worthwhile for me to invest in it, but now I'm certainly glad I did because I enjoyed the film immensely (even though I had my heart in my throat all the time, expecting the picture to freeze and break up any minute - which, thankfully, did not occur!). It's still nothing great, I guess (Lee certainly made many better films where his talents were more immediately in evidence; the hood and the fairly ridiculous accent hamper his performance here somewhat) but it's easily the best film from BU's "The Christopher Lee Collection" Set - and in fact it and the restored edition of THE BLOODY JUDGE (1970), not forgetting the plentiful and wonderful supplements, save this relatively expensive purchase from being a wasted opportunity (considering the low profile of all four titles in the Lee canon)!

The plot is pretty convoluted (I can certainly believe Jess Franco here when he said that Harry Alan Towers is a very good writer, not evidenced by the two Fu Manchu films): while the identity of the killer could have easily been established if one had thought about it for a while (considering it follows the Agatha Christie maxim that the least suspicious-looking character is indeed the guilty party) but, frankly, the film provides red herrings and new twists at every turn that when the final revelation is made, it still comes as fairly surprising (it's perhaps harder to swallow that the buffoonish if clearly ambitious Eddie could be the delicious Margaret Lee's secret lover!). The film also features an arresting opening robbery sequence and is beautifully shot for such a low-budget film. The music score is very atmospheric and the circus scenes consist mainly of stock footage but the lion-taming and knife-throwing acts inject a measure of excitement at appropriate moments.

Casting is certainly above-average for this type of film; there are some pretty good performances here: Leo Genn's above all as the amiable yet dogged Police Inspector; Margaret Lee is more than a radiant beauty - despite her sluttish character, she was fairly sympathetic (especially after having been threatened by a lion) and I think that the film loses something with her sudden, tragic exit; I liked Skip Martin a lot, amusingly named "Mr. Big" - he is a pretty interesting character to begin with (sort of a cynical Chorus to the proceedings), and even more so for being involved in some shady business on the side, for which he gets his just desserts in the end!; Klaus Kinski is eminently watchable despite his limited role (at least he does manage an effective death scene); Cecil Parker added some nice but not overstated British humor; Heinz Drache made for a pretty engaging hero; Suzy Kendall, on the other hand, was more decorative than anything else - though, in all fairness, she could only do so much with her thinly-written role. As I've already mentioned, it's disappointing that Christopher Lee was not involved at all with this release; an interview would have been nice.

The gloved killer of this film brings up comparisons with the giallos being made contemporaneously in Italy, though it's nowhere near as violent (in fact, this one is pretty tame in the scares/gore department). I did notice some flaws in the story: Christopher Lee taking off his hood when his mortal enemy (Drache) is beside him is a miscalculation, in my opinion; ditto, we never learn how Drache finds Lee and Kendall's hiding-place in the cave so easily when we had just been told the Police had scoured the area thoroughly, bearing no results! Also, Lee's death comes as a surprise: he is not the villain and if it was done because it was deemed 'obligatory', it was certainly a silly move!

I only saw the film for the first time a couple of years back but, for the life of me, I have no idea what constitutes the 'new' 8-minute sequence which was supposedly unearthed for this release? Can anyone shed some light on the matter? The Audio Commentary is somewhat dry, though Moxey's enthusiasm for his films (if not his memory of them) is constantly felt throughout the discussion; again, disappointingly, the cuts this film was subjected to are hardly mentioned and certainly not listed in any way - though, in all fairness, Moxey probably wouldn't have watched any of the export versions (not recently anyway)!