Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

A 1967 Technicolor feature from the UK starring the versatile veteran actress Joan Crawford. Miss Crawford plays Monica Rivers the owner of a traveling circus that is suffering a dwindling attendance. Her business manager Dorando(Michael Grough)is at odds with her and wants his share of the business, he wants out. When a tightrope walker(Thomas Cimarro)falls to his death, suddenly ticket sales start increasing. A handsome Frank Hawkins(Ty Hardin)arrives wanting to prove his talent of high-wire walking without a net. Walker is hired and Dorando is mysteriously murdered. Suspicion is cast on Miss Rivers and things get worse; more deaths occur and business keeps bustling. Monica's daughter Angela(Judy Geeson)at 16 is expelled from school and is forced to join her mother at the circus. Dead bodies keep piling up under the big top and the circus folk along with Detective Supt. Brooks(Robert Hardy)are almost certain the owner is guilty of the murders in favor of building her business.Very colorful with typical circus acts. Not much acting from Crawford. Hardin seems nothing more than a proud peacock. I remember sitting in the theater with eyes clued to the screen wondering who would die next. Miss Crawford does prove to have a nice set of legs. Other players include; Diana Dors, Philip Madoc, Peter Burton and Geoffrey Keen.

Campy horror-thriller starring that grand diva of melodrama Joan Crawford. The plot's about a series of gruesome murders at a circus run by Joan. The opening scene of a tightrope walker being impossibly hung by his own high-wire sets the stage for a schlocky horror film. All of the death scenes are great. Perhaps the funniest was Michael Gough's death. The true horror, though, comes not from the grisly death scenes. It comes from seeing Joan Crawford, over sixty years old at this time, romancing half-her-age Ty Hardin. Sexy Diana Dors is fun to watch. She has a hilarious catfight with another circus performer. In all honesty it's not a bad movie of its type. I think because Hollywood legend Joan Crawford is the star, some people go into this in a state of mourning for her career rather than enjoying this for the cheesy horror movie that it is.

The circus tent had been the stage for violence and melodrama ever since the Lon Chaney vehicle THE UNKNOWN (1927); as late as 1966, there had been the average Edgar Wallace yarn starring Christopher Lee CIRCUS OF FEAR – most notoriously, however, was CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960), whose grisliness matches that of HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)…with which the film under review shares its producer (Herman Cohen) and male lead (the late Michael Gough). Still, the latter's appearance here is rather brief – being merely a victim of the killer-on-the-loose this time around: his demise (the back of his head is perforated by a large nail hammered through the hole in a block of wood against which he was resting!), however, is almost as outrageous as the spiked binoculars from BLACK MUSEUM! Anyway, the true star here is Joan Crawford (61 years old but still showing off her legs!) – going through her horror (and final) phase: in fact, she would bow out in 1970 with TROG i.e. yet another (and even more preposterous) Cohen/Gough offering! She is the owner of a traveling circus (eventually joined by rebellious daughter Judy Geeson, who would soon flourish within the genre herself) whose star attractions and associates begin to die on her. Their non-accidental nature obviously draws the Police to the tent (represented by Robert Hardy, later of Hammer's DEMONS OF THE MIND [1972])…but Crawford herself is unperturbed, as she relishes the mass of crowds coming in every night in the hope of capturing another sensational 'accident' live! Needless to say, her callousness makes her the No. 1 suspect, especially after her rival for new performer Ty Hardin's attentions, Diana Dors (in one of the last roles where she would retain her last shapely figure), is literally sawed in half! As often happens with this type of fare, a dwarf virtually acts as Chorus throughout the proceedings; still, the identity of the killer was not hard to guess – especially since this particular character's grudge against Crawford (however honest it may have been) is spelt out some time before the actual denouement!

Joan Crawford's next to last feature film Berserk finds her as boss lady of a circus where a string of murders is being committed. I will say the best thing about Berserk is the circus acts from the Billy Smart Circus where the film was shot in the United Kingdom.As for the film it's your usual slasher flick that could have, but didn't come from Hammer Studios. The whole cast with the exception of Crawford and Ty Hardin playing the hunky high wire artist were from Great Britain and the continent. Hardin's one daring dude, his high wire act not only consists of no net, but he walks underneath a row of very sharp spikes. There's no surviving if he falls.And there's a rapid rate of homicide at Crawford's show unless Scotland Yard in the person of Inspector Robert Hardy can figure out who is killing off the circus, a bit at a time.Maybe Berserk might have been better had Hammer Films actually had done this production. This was the kind of thing they were good at, even if the villain isn't a supernatural one. I will say that the death of Michael Gough is a shocking and original one. You might want to catch Berserk for that alone.As it is there are more red herrings thrown up as potential suspects in Berserk than at feeding time at Marineland.You'll go Berserk just trying to figure it all out.