REVIEW: Richard Carpenter

The irony of most horror films is that we watch them. I know, I know, lots of people love to watch horror films, but with the really gruesome and disturbing ones, I often wonder if the directors are laughing as they make the film because they know that some sad sap will actually watch it. I mean, how one can enjoy something that is obviously made to make them uncomfortable is difficult to understand...at least at first. I had a slight change of heart by the end of The Theatre Bizzarre.

The Theatre Bizzarre begins with quick and chaotic shots of a young woman obsessing over a "bizzarre" theater across the street. She can't help herself, so she sneaks over in the night and discovers a stage set with a cast of strange, paper mache, animatronic characters including a ringmaster/narrator who proceeds to show the young woman a series of short films. These short films make up the majority of The Theatre Bizzarre, each from different directors. The stories seem to be disconnected if not for the animatronic narrator who introduces them and gives a tiny insight into the deeper meaning. Each short film is full of pain and misery for nearly all the characters and lots of blood is spilt. One short in particular, explores the subconscious desires of an unhappy couple. Their dreams become more and more disturbing as the viewer is taken deeper into their subconscious. In the end, the moral and a strong sense of justice is clear: the cheating husband, who'd been controlling and suppressing his wife, is punished physically in a way that seems corollary to the emotional pain that he caused his wife.

In another of the shorts, after witnessing the death of a young man in a motorcycle accident, a very young girl asks her mother serious questions about why people die. While this short is serious, it does not have the disturbing images that the others boast. It also does not have a clear moral. The mother in the film offers her daughter serious and honest answers to her serious questions and we are left to carefully consider our own ideas about the seriousness of death. I enjoyed this short for that reason.

In the end I realize that horror films nearly always have a clear moral. In other words, the horror genre tries to teach a lesson and they do so in the most striking and often disturbing ways. Maybe the makers of horror films think they need to shock us into paying attention...or maybe they just like gross stuff. The point is that I found that there is a good amount of thoughtful story telling and film making in The Theatre Bizzarre, but that doesn't mean that I enjoyed watching it.

Be warned, there is plenty of gratuitous violence and sex in The Theater Bizzarre; for some reason the film is not rated, but just know that it's not for kids.