Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.0

Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie Review

Trudi the Chimp's most iconic performance finally makes it to Blu-ray.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 13, 2011

Are you a fan of films so bad they’re good? Or at least bad? Do you crave sitting through schlock of the lowest caliber if for no other reason than that you can host your own Mystery Science Theater 3000 flame-a-thon narration party? Do you have a soft spot in your heart for the likes of Ed Wood? If so, do I have a film for you. Chances are you’ve never heard of Carnival Magic, and there’s a very good reason for that lack of renown. Though producer Elvin Feltner claims the film was actually released to around 25 theaters nationally in 1981, after listening to Feltner’s commentary track on this newly released Blu-ray I’m inclined to think this apparently very sweet, elderly man is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and has some manufactured memories. Yes, of course, I joke, but only because I can’t quite believe what I’ve just spent 90 or so minutes watching (twice, including the commentary). But whether or not Carnival Magic actually was ever theatrically released is evidently moot, as the film quickly disappeared and was thought for decades to be lost. We should be so lucky. Evidently at least one 35mm print showed up a few years ago, and Carnival Magic recently actually aired on TCM as part of its weeklong homage to schlockmeister director Al Adamson, whose penultimate film Carnival Magic was. If you’ve never heard of Adamson either, you obviously haven’t been exposed (so to speak) to the director’s pulchritudinous films, mini-masterpieces like Psycho a Go-Go, The Naughty Stewardesses and the one film of Adamson’s you may actually have heard of and maybe even seen, 1971’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Adamson and Ed Wood are filmmaking peas in a pod and I’m sure the two would have gotten along famously, even if Adamson didn’t relent and wear an angora sweater. Carnival Magic has the same sort of insanely goofy premise as any Wood film, it features the same wooden acting, the same inartful camera setups, and the same decidedly lo-fi ambience. But Carnival Magic is perhaps even better, or worse, or worse-better or better-worse, depending on how addled you are when you begin watching it and how much more addled you are by the time a real life carnival parade closes the film in a sort of hilarious verité segment which then explodes with the promise (or is it a threat?) of “So long for now—see you next year in More Carnival Magic”.

No, that's not Trudi.

Where does one begin with a film this deliberately odd and indescribable? To say that this film is not exactly the paradigm of what a children’s film should be is perhaps an understatement. Basically Carnival Magic deals with circus magician Markov (The Guiding Light’s Don Stewart), who in fact has real telepathic, levitating and conjuring powers. That doesn’t help him with the carnies, however, and he’s about to lose his job until the owner’s daughter (Jennifer Houlton) convinces Markov to start featuring his roommate, a super-intelligent talking chimp named Alexander the Great (Trudi, in her acclaimed—okay, her only—performance), in the show. That only raises the ire of the hard drinking lion tamer who vows to turn Alex over to an animal testing laboratory to be poked, prodded and probably dissected. I’m sure you already have your pre-orders in and your children stoked for this once in a lifetime family film viewing experience.

It’s perhaps indicative of this film’s overall ineptitude that the finest performance is given by Trudi the Chimp, somehow overlooked by the Academy Awards, in her epochal performance as down home, good ol’ boy Alex, an acting feat rivaled perhaps only by Linda Hunt’s similarly cross-dressing turn in The Year of Living Dangerously. Trudi gets to do everything from drive a car in a sort of Smokey and the Bandit chase sequence to tug brutally on the audience’s heartstrings in a deathbed scene that would give Ali MacGraw a run for her Love Story money. And, no, I swear I am not making any of this up.

Somehow, somewhere, some way Carnival Magic attracted a cult following, though one suspects it’s a cult made up of herbally enhanced viewers who can’t stop giggling, no matter what ludicrous situation may or may not be unfolding on the screen. Rumor had it that all prints had been destroyed or lost to the ravages at time, and then a new, improved rumor sprang up that the only existing print had been discovered under the cold, dead fingers of director Adamson, who ended his life as a murder victim in Florida. According to the press sheet included with this release, there actually turned out to be a veritable treasure trove of Carnival Magic in an east coast warehouse which was uncovered a couple of years ago. This evidently included multiple prints, and, if we’re to believe the keepcase insert, an actual internegative from which this release was mastered. And yet still some heathens complain about Welles’ original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons or Touch of Evil being permanently lost.

This is a film that managed to get one pull quote from New Jersey’s WWOR. While this pull quote is unintentionally (we hope, anyway) funnier than anything in Carnival Magic itself, it is also so mind bogglingly absurd that it by its very nature may open the floodgates on a whole new generation of New Jersey jokes, at least as they pertain to television film critics. Ladies and germs, WWOR-TV proclaimed Carnival Magic “the finest family film since E.T.” If you’re not laughing by now, there’s always those madcap antics of Trudi the Chimp.

Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Carnival Magic has seen the Blu-ray light of day courtesy of the same parent company which has released the recent PD BD's of The Stranger and Kansas City Confidential. If we're to believe the keepcase insert, unlike those two releases (which were mastered from 35mm prints), Carnival Magic was mastered in HD from an actual internegative, though the restoration demonstration included as a brief supplement on the Blu-ray certainly looks more like a badly faded, horribly damaged print, unless the internegative was treated very, very badly. In any case, this AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 is quite clean and damage free, and it sports actually quite iimpressive black levels. It's the color here that's the most problematic. It's skewed toward the pink side of things, which you can easily see from the screen captures. That said, the original version shown in the restoration demo was really a sickly yellow, and this was certainly not a Technicolor release by any stretch of the imagination, so this may in fact be the best that color timing and correction can offer with this release. Overall the image is fairly soft, but that again is probably due more to the miniscule budget and original film elements than to this transfer. This does seem to be another victim of fairly aggressive DNR, though the softness of the elements actually helps to ameliorate any over-waxy look this time around.

Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

No lossless audio is offered on this Blu-ray, but if that's your biggest complaint about Carnival Magic, you're doing pretty well in my estimation. Two Dolby tracks are offered, 5.1 and 2.0, and they're both reasonably well done. This was obviously shot and recorded on a shoestring, so don't expect any whiz-bang immersion or fantastic audio quality, but there's no egregious damage to report here, either. Things sound noticeably compressed, especially on some of the music cues (the final, live recording of the circus parade is probably worst in this regard). Overall, though, while there's nothing to write home about, there's nothing to get too worked up in a negative way about, either.

Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Carnival Magic offers these semi-magical supplements:

• Feature Commentary by Cult Film Historian Joe Rubin and Producer Elvin Feltner is often unintentionally hilarious. Rubin is fawning, Feltner is apparently clueless, and the two make for their own perfect version of MST3K.
• Interview with Elvin Feltner (HD; 11:49) is from April 2010 and features the very nice producer talking about this mammoth undertaking.
• Outtakes (HD; 20:27). These feature no audio, which means they make infinitely more sense than the film itself.
• Slide Show (HD; 4:40) seems to feature newspaper clips and (could it be they actually released one for this film?) a pressbook.
• Trailers
• Restoration Demo

Carnival Magic Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're suitably jaded (as in fact I am), Carnival Magic will provide a once in a lifetime (you can hope, anyway) experience. How anyone thought this could ever be a kids' film is truly beyond belief, but as it stands, Carnival Magic features one jaw droppingly absurd scene after another. I can't outright recommend this title, since it's so completely off the charts in terms of content, but if you possess a certain black sense of humor (and you know who you are), this is the finest Trudi the Chimp film on Blu-ray you will see released this or any year.