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Freaks

1932

Tod Browning

Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates ...

8.2

23,676

Drama. Horror The story involves duplicitous trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) seducing sideshow midget Hans (Earles) for his inheritance. Hans’ reluctant friends, the other sideshow attractions, resist allowing her into their clan, until Hans maintains her love is genuine.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Tom Huddleston Time Out	"One of the most powerful films ever made about the need for humanity and solidarity in the face of cruelty and oppression (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of five)"	POS
United States	L.N. The New York Times	"'Freaks' is not a picture to be easily forgotten (...) The reason, of course, is the underlying sense of horror, the love of the macabre that fills the circus sideshows"	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"A macabre masterpiece that still shocks"	POS
United States	Variety	"[The story] is not sufficiently strong to get and hold the interest, partly because interest cannot easily be gained for a too fantastic romance."	NEG
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film"	POS
United States	Time	"Director Tod Browning, one of the few truly individual directors in the U. S., is a specialist in horror."	POS
United Kingdom	Mark Kermode The Guardian	"If there are 'freaks' on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

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