Carnival of Souls (Audio Commentary)

Film Year:  1962
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Herk Harvey
Starring:  Candace Hilligoss
Commentator:  Michael J. Nelson

The Movie

*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED*

Carnival of Souls tells the story of a woman who is the sole survivor of a car crash and finds her life feeling off.  Following her dream of becoming an organist (you go, girl!), she has trouble relating to other people and finds that there is a strange pale man following her around.

Some of this movie's most interesting aspects come from its twist ending, so I hope you forgive me if I discuss spoilers openly.  If not, you've been warned.  But I assume most riffing fans don't care.

Carnival of Souls is somewhat the Sixth Sense of its day.  In that it's poorly acted, poorly written, popular for some reason, and has pretty much the same twist ending.  It's pretty plain after a while that this woman didn't survive the opening accident and this is the story of ghouls dragging her soul into the afterlife.  Stories like this predate this movie, and there is even a Twilight Zone episode called The Hitchhiker which is almost the exact same thing.  I don't know if the film was all that surprising or shocking at the time, but it's pretty easy to stay two steps ahead of it.  Especially when it's as meandering as it is.

The film's best attribute, also like The Sixth Sense, comes from its atmospheric direction.  Interestingly enough the director, Herk Harvey, should be familiar with riffing fans, but not by films.  He is actually the director of many educational short subjects that have been featured on MST and Rifftrax, including the likes of What About Juvenile Delinquency?, Why Study Industrial Arts?, and Shake Hands With Danger.  Harvey shows genuine talent and genre diversity, which makes it a shame he didn't direct more films.  But one can look at some of the actors featured both in this film and his shorts, and it becomes clear he wasn't really an actor's director, so maybe it's for the best.

Carnival of Souls is a kinda classic.  Some people insist it is completely, though it seems more like a cult film than anything.  It has strong moments of suspense, but they're surrounded by too many moments of "yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh."  This movie probably could have been quite good, but it just misses its mark.

The Commentary

From what I remember, this seems to be the last commentary Mike did for Legend Films where he actually tried to be semi-informative, dropping tidbits here and there on the making of the film and ending with a joke.  This is probably because all parties involved likely realized if one were likely to pick up the disc solely to listen to Mike's commentary (which, let's be honest, was probably most, if not all, who bought these discs, because nobody gives a shit about colorizing old films really), then they probably want to laugh more often than hear about the making of the movie.

But since Mike's teetering a bit on not knowing where the line between technical and historical audio commentary and riffing should lie yet, I'd say he did a pretty good job for the most part in these early releases.  They're funny, and even if the tidbits weren't interesting he did often find a way to twist it into a solid gag.  Though sometimes he apologizes for the gag, as if risking offending someone from the actual production who might be listening in.

There is quite a bit of this in Carnival of Souls.  But for the most part I got some pretty strong laughs out of the affair.  This movie is fairly easy to make fun of, with the stiff acting and inane plot.  Mike likes to joke around with the film settings, telling people to never move to Utah and the like.  There are one or two characters he latches onto, such as the sleazy boarding house neighbor who hits on our heroine constantly, and the odd landlady.

Yet, there are quite a few elements that slip through Mike's fingers.  There are strange occurrences and hilariously bad acting that seem to be begging for something to be said about them, but Mike just drifts by them.  Future riffs of this film will correct the issue, so it's easy to forgive Mike's solo venture as just a rough draft.  I will say that the third act needed a lot of work, as our main character finds herself in the titular Carnival of Souls, while Mike just rambles on about music acts that are entirely irrelevant.  It's kinda funny at first, but as it goes on it feels like he's out of steam and is just ready for this damn movie to end.

I'm of two minds on this commentary.  On one hand the successful laughs are very funny and consistently entertaining for a while, but as we enter the climax this riff nosedives quite hard.  I'm going to say as a commentary venture this is fairly strong and is probably worth picking up, though don't be surprised if your attention drifts at the end.

Good

The DVD

As a part of Legend Films' colorization line, Carnival of Souls is a disc made to show off their color print of this traditionally black and white film.  The color print is fine, though skin tones look unnatural and everyone's hair looks like bad wigs.  They seem to have had fun with the film's ghouls, which received minimal colorization to create a simplistic otherworldlyness.  This color print is worth checking out for how well this take on these ghosts come off.

As for bonus features, we have a black and white print as well as a batch of trailers for this film, Night of the Living Dead, and The Flesh Eaters.  The former two are colorized, though The Flesh Eaters is in black and white.  There is also a trivia section.