Freakshow is set in a circus where Lon (Christopher Adamson) runs a freak show, scheming blonde tart Lucy (Rebekah Kochan) & her slimy boyfriend Lee (Mark Preston Miller) decide to rip him off. They devise a plan where Lucy seduces Lan, gets him to propose to her & then kill him off leaving her to inherit all of his money so she & Lee can live happily ever after, simple eh? What could go wrong? Well, Lucy gets cold feet & her murderous plan is discovered & the freaks want revenge...<br /><br />Directed by Drew Bell & although uncredited & unacknowledged Freakshow is a remake of Tod Browning's controversial classic black and white horror flick Freaks (1932), not wishing to put to fine a point on it Freakshow is frankly crap. The script by Keith Leopard is pretty faithful to Browning's original but with several changes, the basic story of a 'normal' person trying to exploit the freaks by marrying into their number is still present & correct but it's the character's which are the main difference. In the original the Lan character was a midget called Hans & he is presented as a naive lovestruck child, someone to sympathise with & feel sorry for, here in Freakshow Lan is depicted as nothing more than a dirty old man who wants a nice young blonde girl to give him a blow job when he wants, motivation which just doesn't entice the same sort of feelings towards him. In the original the Lucy character was named Cleopatra & again in a way you could see that she was evil but wanted a good life of her own with her boyfriend, here Lucy is just a slut who is used by both Lan to get a blow job & by her boyfriend to help him steal Lan's money & she falls for it. In the original the freaks themselves were proper character's, here they are just a collection of amputees missing various limbs, dwarfs, retards, a strongman & a half-man half-woman thing who barely feature. The dialogue is poor, the character's turn the original story from a sometimes moving piece involving real people into a standard low budget horror where you don't care about anyone & to top it all off it's seriously slow & boring with virtually no exploitation or gore at all. There's one bit in this I don't get, Lucy refuses to drink out of a bowl that the freaks had just drank out of fearing drinking their spit, however it is also shown that Lucy has no problem having sex or giving a blow job to a man old enough to be her dad & literally covered in warts & boils!<br /><br />Director Bell does nothing to make this watchable, the entire circus consists of three tents, one carousel & a ferris wheel which no-one ever visits! This film has the most number of slow, boring & utterly pointless fades to black at the end of a scene I've ever seen in a single film, it also has some utterly awful gramophone style 20's & 30's music constantly playing on the soundtrack to maybe try & evoke an atmosphere like the original 1932 version? The film is also shot in a sepia tone (again maybe to try & mimic the original black and white original) which gives everything a candle lit orange type hue, like yeah that's original isn't it? There's very, very little gore here, the filmmakers hired some of those masochist type guy's who hang themselves on hooks which piece their skin & can be found just about everywhere to do several hooks piecing the skin on their backs type scenes, there's a bit when someone cuts a girls scalp off, someone head is bashed in (off screen), someone is hit with a wrench (off screen), someone is stabbed with a knife, someone has part of their throat bitten out & the end sequence which doesn't last that long & is again full of annoying slow fade to black shots when Lucy has her lips sewn shut, the skin on her body sliced off as well as the skin on her face in a scene which is much less effective than a similar one in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).<br /><br />With a supposed budget of $1,000,000 one has to say Freakshow felt like it had a lower budget than that & I wouldn't be surprised if it was. It looks grubby & cheap with horrible music, annoying editing, poor special effects & a circus which consists of about three tents in a field. The acting sucks as well.<br /><br />Freakshow is a terrible film to be sure, it's one of those films which promises much but delivers nothing. There's no gore for 80 minutes, the character's are awful & if you don't think that matters watch the original again & see the difference. It's throughly boring to sit through as well, one to avoid.