Rough home movie footage of Coney Island's Astroland amusement park circa the 1970's overlaid with a cheesy flower child hippie guitar tune intersperses with a scene of a crotchety couple arguing and odd opening credits sequence of the woman's severed head seemingly chatting it up with someone off-screen until her melon is chopped in half vertically courtesy of a manly pair of hands and a machete. Such is our introduction to the Carnival of Blood... speaking of which, there wasn't a drop of the red stuff from that bisected coconut, leading me to believe they didn't use a real severed head for this movie... Frankly, I'm shocked. Anyway, the couple (Harry and Claire) wind up patronizing a boardwalk tarot card (*cough*poker cards*cough*) reader who, in standard movie fashion, foresees a very short and fatal future in their, uhm, future if they don't go home immediately. Of course Claire nags her hubby into playing one of those "kill the balloons with the darts" games that leads to an unwatchable 3 minute scene of the lady screeching and nagging non-stop, demeaning her ulcer ridden man while flirting with a younger guy whose balloon popping abilities are far superior. I don't care how misogynistic it sounds; I'm praying her death will be suitably violent and agonizing given the amount of torment she's putting us through. I'm keeping my talons crossed for something that could make Pat Bateman blush.

The resultant decapitation is only moderately satisfying as Claire's cabeza falls off following a ride through a haunted cave ride. The fountain of gore that spews from her neck is nice, but the logic farts that come before it (Harry doesn't see anything happen, Claire's head manages to stay attached until the end of the ride despite all the jostling) just soften the blow with bad filmmaking. Who could have killed the harpy (aside from Jason and the Argonauts of course)? Depending on how misleading the writer-director may or may not try to be, it's possible that the murder was committed by Gimpy: the flannel shirted hunchback who works the balloon game stand. Why would I suggest that, beyond the general attempt by movies to always blame the deformed guy with a pillow in the back of his shirt? Well, the fact that he's leaving the scene of the crime with Claire's stuffed bear clutched to his misshapen bosom may have something to do with that…

This is the part of the movie where we go back to focusing on the recently promoted District Attorney (and general hippie do-gooder) Dan and his art teacher fiancée Laura. These kids were introduced earlier in the movie, but it was in this mooshy scene that included her pawing at his nekkid man nipple and all it did was needlessly traumatize me and interrupt the Harry and Claire scene, so I didn't mention it before. Despite his blind concern that Laura could have been the victim of the previous night's murder (sure, a middle-aged woman with short, platinum hair is found decapitated and you immediately think it's your twenty-something fiancée with her long blonde hair, I can see that...), he thinks that a trip to the scene of the crime could help him get an advantage on solving the case himself… despite the fact that he’s not a cop. Personally, I wouldn't drag my girlfriend to a carnival the night after another woman had been brutally murdered there, but that's Dan's business. Then again, I'm pretty sure that most carnivals wouldn't be operating the night after someone had been decapitated on one of their rides, but then this is 1970s Coney Island, so if they had to close the place down every time somebody wound up dead on the premises, they'd have a very quiet season. Whatever the case, this leads to another sequence of a couple perusing the Astroland scene with bad hippie flower child guitar accompaniment, followed by another toenail pulling visit to the balloon popping game, as a drunken sailor and his whore stumble through a game and air their emotional grievances in public... Is this going to be the reoccurring theme for the next hour: shitheads trying to pop balloons while their arm candy bitches them out?! I've haven't been this frustrated for a 90 minute period since my last bout of constipation! At least that I could fix with a box of Raisin Bran and some Metamucil. In the words of Charlie Brown, "ARGH!"

While out on their Coney Island date, D & L chill with her buddy Tom (Gimpy's boss and operator of the dart game) before getting a palm reading session from the fortune teller not unlike the "you're gonna die now" one she gave to Harry and Claire. These two manage to survive the horror house ride though, so I guess the whole "you're gonna die now" thing is just part of the gypsy's act? Meh. As for that soused sailor and his tramp from the last paragraph, Popeye drags her down to the beach for a late night drunken make out session (and by "late night" I mean "day time") that drags on and goes nowhere for what seems like forever, until a lumpy, hairy, sweater clad arm stabs her in the stomach and pulls out her guts. The gut yanking is pretty much superfluous by exploitation standards, and the scene only stands out because the sunlight, errr, "moonlight" drenched sequence reveals two things: (1) you can plainly see the victim's unmarred stomach through the hole in the dress following the attack, after her innards have supposedly been removed and (2) you can make out who the killer is when they show a full body shot of him that was supposed to be covered up by nighttime and shadows... In case you’re wondering, it’s Tom. I thought I'd grown a colon polyp after watching this movie for the first time, but my doctor assured me that it was just a mental trick brought on by some kind of terrible personal trauma. Surprise surprise, the more I watch of this the second time, the more my asshole starts to hurt...

Continuing to jump back and forth between night scenes and day scenes that are all supposedly occurring in the same 5 minute time span, Tom invites Gimpy back to his place for a beer and the two leave Astroland, arm in arm. What should come as a shock to no one, Tom's house is filled with stuffed animals and there's a very unsettling scene of the two having an awkward conversation about why Gimpy killed his childhood pet and why Tom doesn't have a girlfriend. Fortunately, the audio is so badly done that we can't hear parts of Gimpy's half of the conversation. Unfortunately, the audio is working just fine when Tom asks Gimpy if he'd like to stay the night with him... It’s now that the back of my brain sears like a $5 steak lunch special at Applebee's. WHY DOES THIS MOVIE INSIST ON CONTINUING?! WHOSE GRANDMOTHER DID I RAPE IN MY LAST LIFE TO DESERVE THIS!?

With a joy I haven't felt since that time I broke my little toe by stubbing it on the coffee table, there's another nauseating scene of an irritating person going to the fortune teller, followed up by another nut-kicking scene at the dart game booth! I must be a fucking psychic myself, because the entire movie really is the same damn scene on a loop at this point! Oh, wait, there's something new for this scene though! Is it the same “dramatic” 2 second sound byte of bad keyboard music that they’ve been playing ever 3 minutes? No, that's not it. Oh, wait, I know, it's the way that a character whose tarot card reading foretells their death is violently killed shortly after they play the dart game and piss-off Gimpy, right?! No, that's not it either. Oh, wait, it's gotta be the way that the scene shifts inexplicably between daytime shots and nighttime shots! Fuck, still not it... Ah, I see it now, it's the new twist to the mystery when this latest of a string of obnoxious carnival-goers follows up her dart game session by going into a nearby Nathan's hot dog joint, where she bothers a bunch of customers until she gets a meal of fried clams, then gets her eyeballs tugged out by a burly attacker! Genius! The only possible way to make a series of testicle grindingly unbearable scenes tolerable is to draw out each of the nigh-cloned scenes that follows them, and making these new scenes TWICE as excruciating to sit through with victims that only become exponentially more grating on my nerves than the last! I've underestimated your brilliance for the last time Mr. Leonard Kirtman, because you truly are a craftsman of the highest caliber and celluloid is the medium for your brilliance! Forgive this simple death god for ever doubting the Wizard of Oz type of genius with which you wield the writer’s pen and director’s camera, much in the way of King Arthur himself hefting the legendary Excalibur!... Okay, I've gone delirious.

Back to what we’re trying to pass off as a story, Dan and Laura (yeah, I forgot they were in the movie too) have a fight over his obsession with solving this case (I repeat, he's not even a cop...) and his insistence on dragging his fiancée back to the scene of three brutal murders, night after night… because 3 violent murders apparently still is not enough to get the NYPD to shut down the unstoppable juggernaut that is the Coney Island boardwalk. Of course, despite the couple’s massive engagement undoing argument about how Laura refuses to go back to the carnival, she goes back there later anyway by herself! Would somebody be so kind as to start hammering carpet tacks into my fingers? I need something to take my mind off of all this before I overheat and forget math… When Laura seeks out Tom and tells him about her break-up with Dan and her subsequent mutilation of a bear that Dan had won for her from Tom's dart game, the creepy old weirdo flips his wig, shouts at her, calls her a selfish slut and drives her away. With a crazed look in his eye, he prepares to do to her what he's done with his three other victims… oh yeah, uhm, *spoiler alert*… or something… When Gimpy tries to stop Tom from making a terrible mistake, the deformed turd pile gets a knife in his gut for the trouble. So ends the life of one of moviedom's greatest characters since Torgo. Goodbye Gimpy, may you go softly and sweetly into that starlit night sky... or sunlit afternoon sky, whichever one they filmed your death scene during.

Despite having just been called a selfish slut by the man, Laura thinks nothing of it when Tom catches up to her and offers to take her on the carnival rides. He finally loses it completely on the Wonder Wheel, where he starts calling her Mommy and tells her that he needs to kill her so she can't hurt anyone else the way she hurt Daddy... Whatever hack-ass attempt at intensity and drama that was supposed to happen during this scene is immediately shot in the face as we jump into a weird “flashback but not a flashback” scene of Tom in a child’s bedroom, bathed in red light and clutching at a stuffed bear while a voiceover flashback of Tom's parents fighting and more of that fuck awful music that sounds like somebody’s raping a piano in the background. Meanwhile, Dan, who found a teddy bear stuffed with the intestines of Tom's victims (I know what I'm getting my niece for Cthulhumas this year!) back at the freak's creepy apartment, has been racing around Astroland trying to find Laura before she's wearing her spleen on the outside. He arrives in dramatic heroic fashion to pull Tom off of her at the last minute (well, technically he’s calmed down by that point and is no longer a threat), then chases the crazy to the street, where Tom Boy is hit by a car. As he lies there dying and covered in blood splatters (where the fuck did those come from?! It looks like he just finished slaughtering a chicken!), Dan reaches down to pull a layer of fake skin from the loony’s face to reveal that Tom's been hiding his true visage, which was horribly scarred from a fire set by... oh fuck it, I've earned these end credits and I'm not typing another word!

As if you couldn't tell by every paragraph preceding this one, Carnival of Blood has no redeeming qualities. You could probably use the disc to chop your cocaine up on, or use the case it comes in to stash your weed, but the movie itself is abominable. In fact, I’m going to call up Homeland Security and suggest that it be added to the list of items not allowed aboard airplanes. It will forever stain my heart and soul like a ravenous cancer, and deserves to be ultimately forgotten, locked away, and never seen by the eyes of man again lest it melt the eyes and brains of all who would come into contact with it, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant, only without the religious connotations. This is the kind of painful torture that’s so bad it should only be used to violate the civil rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in videotaped interrogations that will be destroyed by the military 3 years later to avoid be charged for war crimes in a global court. 60 minutes in and the terrorist will be begging for a transfer to Abu Ghraib. The worst part? Telling them that Abu Ghraib has been closed down and there is no escape from Grand Inquisitor Leonard Kirtman!

Carnival Blood definitely helps to clarify why Kirtman was well suited to make so many porno movies after this: he was born to spawn features where the same basic scene is repeated over and over again with different people, and he obviously had the fortitude to sacrifice the movie’s overall quality for the sake of saving a few bucks and getting it done with as soon as possible. Think about it: porno is just a series of scenes where different people fuck over and over again, Carnival of Blood is just a series of scenes where different pairs of ass-crabs visit a fortune teller, play a dart game, then get killed. Porno is shot as quickly and cheaply as possible, Carnival of Blood was shot so quickly and cheaply that if the night scenes weren’t wrapped up before sunrise, the crew simply kept on shooting through the morning and early-afternoon and threw the footage together later instead of waiting another day for the sun to go down and having to pay the cast and crew for an additional day of shooting. Then again, I’ve never seen a porno that made me want to jam a katana into my gut and go all seppuku on myself so I wouldn’t have to finish watching it, so fuck you Kirtman, and fuck your stupid little movie.