Terror Circus (film)

Simone, Sheri, and Corinne, three showgirls, are traveling through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas when their car's radiator fails, leaving them stranded overnight. At dawn, a man named Andre offers to bring the women to his property in the desert. They are horrified upon arrival to find Andre's homestead contains a large barn full of shackled women whom he dehumanizes and keeps as prisoners to perform tricks, envisioning himself as a circus showman.

The three women become part of Andre's "troupe" of female slaves, and are chained together and forced to follow his sadistic orders as they march through the desert. One of the women, a scientist, reveals that Andre kidnapped her while she was in the area studying the ecological effects of a nearby nuclear power plant. The women become ecstatic when Andre accidentally leaves the keys to their shackles in the barn, and they make a desperate attempt to free themselves, only to be punished when Andre returns.

Meanwhile, the women's agent, Derek Moore, files a missing persons report, and Sheriff Stanford attempts to locate the three missing showgirls. At Andre's barn, he orders one of the women into the desert where he smears her with calf's blood and sets a caged wild cougar loose to stalk her. The woman flees, only to be slashed to death by an unseen assailant in a shed. Andre takes her body and places it in a laboratory near the barn, where he plays a music box and reminisces about his mother's abandonment of him.

Andre becomes fixated on Simone, whom he believes to be his mother, and confesses to Simone that the military attempted to drive his family from their homestead while conducting a nuclear experiment that left his father grotesquely deformed. Simone placates Andre by playing into his delusions, hoping to free herself and the others. Later, Andre selects Sheri as his next "performer" in which she will play the role of the "Reptile Lady." He throws her to the ground and releases a boa constrictor beside her, forcing her to writhe alongside the snake.

After Simone is locked in Andre's laboratory, she manages to find the keys to the women's shackles, and manages to free herself. She sneaks into the barn and frees several of the other captives before Andrew returns. Meanwhile, Derek and Sheriff Stanford find the women's abandoned car, and Stanford calls in reinforcement. Andre, incensed by Simone's betrayal, douses her in blood and attempts to cage her with the cougar, but one of the freed women incapacitates him and chains him to the cage. Another of the captives enters the nearby shack, where she inadvertently frees Andre's disfigured father. Andre's father, driven insane by the radioactive exposure he suffered, murders Andrew and Simone before entering the barn, where he slaughters the women one by one.

Sheriff Stanford and his deputies arrives at the property, but are too late, finding only one lone survivor, who has been driven insane by the horrors she has witnessed. The deputies locate one other woman wandering the property in a daze, and depart with the two survivors, unaware that Andre's father remains free, roaming the desert.

Principal photography of Terror Circus took place in Palmdale, California.[8] The film was largely directed by Alan Rudolph, a protege of Robert Altman, as his directorial debut.[9] However, the film's credits list Gerald Cormier as director, with some sources alleging that Cormier was a pseudonym Rudolph used.[6][7] According to actor Prine, however, Gerald Cormier, the head of the film's distributor, CMC Pictures Corporation,[4] was one of two other directors hired to make the film before Rudolph took over.[5] According to the American Film Institute, the film's credited writer, Ralph Harolde, may also have been a pseudonym used by Rudolph.[1]

In a 2009 documentary short included on the Code Red DVD and subsequent Blu-ray releases of the film, producer Marvin Almeas and others involved in the making of the film recount that Gerald Cormier was in fact the film's original director, and that Rudolph was an assistant on the production who ultimately took over as director.[8] Cormier appears in the film portraying Andre's deformed father.[8]

The film screened under the title Terror Circus in McAllen, Texas on October 31, 1973,[2] and in San Angelo, beginning December 14, 1973.[10] It later screened in Texas under the alternate title The Barn of the Naked Dead in September 1975 on a double bill with The Flesh and Blood Show (1972).[11]

• Allon, Yoram; Cullen, Del; Patterson, Hannah, eds. (2002). Contemporary North American Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide. London, England: Wallflower Press. ISBN 978-1-903-36452-9.
• Everman, Welch D. (2000). Cult Horror Films: From Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to Zombies of Mora Tau. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press. ISBN 978-0-806-51425-3.
• Hannan, Brian (2018). In Theaters Everywhere: A History of the Hollywood Wide Release, 1913-2017. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-476-67414-8.
• LoBrutto, Vincent (2021). The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-538-13719-2.
• Sykes, Brad (2018). Terror in the Desert: Dark Cinema of the American Southwest. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-476-63132-5.

• Terror Circus at IMDb
• Terror Circus at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Terror Circus at AllMovie
• Terror Circus at Rotten Tomatoes