Barn of the Naked Dead




Years ago (maybe 7 or 8) Stalwart Dan called me up. This was in the days of video stores being your main source for crap films (okay, maybe not *your* source, dear reader, maybe you don't even deign to watch them, but definitely our source along with interlibrary loan), the days before I even had a DVD player, but just at the beginning of the great video store die out. This was when the chains were massacring the Mom and Pop stores and even smaller chains. Where a great place to get your bad movie fix was a going-out-of-business sale at a video store. Well, Stalwart had found a small place near his apartment in then-exotic Somerville (I had been living and going to school in Waltham for years but didn't know any of Boston's suburbs well). This place had a crazy collection and so we went and one of the flicks he picked up was Simon, King of the Witches. Stalwart was crazy for the flick and a few years later I watched it with him and saw why. Andrew Prine (Bandolero!) is simply awesome (simultaneously likeable and totally ridiculous) as the title character, a self-style warlock/magician who lives in a storm drain and never seems to catch a break. From there (and a viewing of Grizzly) Stalwart Dan and I acquired a love of Andrew Prine that borders on the unnatural. Around that time I think I noted Barn of the Naked Dead aka Terror Circus aka Nightmare Circus on Prine's resume but as it was unavailable on video or DVD I never thought to track it down.


Warning-Spoilers ahead



So about a month ago Stalwart emails me and mentions that the film, along with Simon, is available on DVD-and on Netflix no less. So this weekend we got together for a little crap fest. Now, the title of Barn of the Naked Dead is nearly completely misleading. Yes, there is a barn, and at one point there are naked people and many of them end up dead, but at no point is there a barn of naked dead. Prine plays a backwoods lunatic who kidnaps women and "trains" them to be part of his "Circus". Seems poppa used to run a little roadside attraction circus until the army moved in to the desert and began testing nukes. Pop got caught in the nuke and now Prine keeps him in a shed and uses him to kill the "untrainable" animals. Three women (I think they're supposed to be singers) break down in the desert on the way to their act and are kidnapped by Prine and learn the horrors of his barn. Meanwhile they're agent, who makes Mitchell look competent, slowly decides to look for them, eventually getting the local sheriff to actually do his job and find the horrors of Prine's barn.

This is actually a pretty tame flick-as I said there's about 30 seconds of nudity and there's a tiny amount of gore towards the end, but mostly it's just Prine acting crazy (which is fun, but not great) inter cut with the agents vague attempts to find his missing star act (ha) and the bland female leads being "chained" (i.e. loops of chain around their necks) to stakes with animal pelts thrown over them, slowly figuring out what happened to Prine (mom left, daddy got singed, he thinks he's prepping a circus act). It's a pretty dull and very cheaply made enterprise; highlights are Prine's "wacko" moments, especially in his ringmaster's outfit, the bumbling agent and the totally goofy theme song "Evil Eyes". I can't really recommend it to anyone but Prine fans and gluttons for punishment. Simon, on the other hand, is as charming and unique as ever, and it really is fun to watch with crisp DVD presentation, particularly the 2001 rip-off psychadelic sequence.