The Devil's Carnival (2012)
It takes a lot to piss me off. I'm a fairly patient guy and I'll give anything a chance. When I found The Devil's Carnival I knew it would be a challenge. Here's another musical, probably filmed very much like a stage production. I can handle that, I told myself… I enjoyed Moulin Rouge! well enough.
Things even started looking up. Dayton Callie, from Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy, plays the ticket keeper, and Sean Patrick Flanery, from Powder and The Boondock Saints, plays a grieving father who is stuck mourning for his deceased child. Some good casting, so surely this movie won't suck that bad, right?
Wrong wrong wrong. I haven't been this pissed off at a movie since I walked out of Underworld almost 10 years ago.
Oh where to start. The Devil's Carnival begins with three people dying and going to hell, except hell is a twisted carnival instead of fire and brimstone. Beyond the opening everything is based on Aesop's Fables. Not loosely inspired by, but very much written on top of. As in, the devil is sitting in a chair and reading three stories from a copy of Aesop's Fables. Fine. Plenty of movies are based on classic literature and they turned out just fine (O Brother Where Art Thou, for instance).
Surely with such a great literary backdrop the filmmakers could do some amazing things by interpreting the stories through song and dance. Well, I'm sure they could have, but they didn't. For a musical to work the songs and music have to be good. The songs and music in The Devil's Carnival are terrible. The lyrics are weak ("so trust me, trust me, darling dear, I'm so sincere, there's no need to tear") and the music is an annoying cacophony of discord.
This movie is one of the worst I've ever seen. It's one thing for a low-budget movie to be intentionally cheesy and bad, but here's a film that thinks far too much of itself, strutting around throwing its song and dance in your face. It's sort of like being at the zoo and the monkeys are throwing their shit at you… they think it's the greatest thing in the world, and you're standing there disgusted.
I don't want to be a complete negative Nancy though, so let me point out two positive things:
- The set design and costumes are pretty good, so kudos to the production and costume design team.
- The movie is only 55 minutes long so my suffering was short.