Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Aaron1375 Full Moon Studios is a film production company that mainly does horror films. In fact, that may be all they do. They had a few good films back in the day, their strongest period probably being in the 80's as in the 90's they made nearly everything a horror/comedy. They never were as bad as Troma though, as their films felt like they were almost big time, but not quite, while everything about Troma says cheap. That being said, for the most part, I really do not care for the movies this studio churned out during the 90's. A lot of them had potential, but just missed the mark and some of them were just horrid abominations that never even should have been conceived. This one I found to be kind of okay which is high praise indeed for one of their movies made after like 91 or so. It was not a great film by any means, but I was enjoying what they were presenting and even if I were hating it, one thing nearly every Full Moon Studio film does is end fairly quickly as they usually do not clock in over 1 hour 20 minutes. The film's main fault I found was that it did end too quickly as one minute it was on, the next it was over.The story has a group of sort of friends going to a carnival. The group consists of an obnoxious dude that wants to be the center of attention, his friend who seems to be the most sensible, a girl who wants to be worshiped, but has space issues, a girl who wants a hot body and the sensible boy's brother who is confined to a chair. The obnoxious guy has trouble with one of the games and the wheelchair bound boy figures the game is rigged and after this the proprietor of the freak show seems to take an interest which grows when the obnoxious person makes fun of the proprietor for being a little person. They go into a fortune telling hut where they are read their fortunes and they also get tickets to the freak show where they see some rather disturbing freaks and soon the girl who wants a perfect body goes missing. The friends with the exception of the sensible one just have to try and search for her which brings them all into danger! The freaks were pretty good as the strange bug man looked rather good as did inside out girl. The one guy whose brother lived in in his belly was right out of Total Recall and then they had one that I did not get at all in Digestina. They billed her as being able to eat anything, but all she did was sit in a vat of acid it seemed. She kind of made no sense; however, she was the hottest girl in the film. The teens are all idiots and probably deserved worse than they got. The sensible guy though ended up just in a field and then the movie ended. Not sure what that was all about as in this particular case I kind of wanted the film to go on a bit. Ross Hagen turns up in a bit part as the sheriff and Phil Fondacaro as the proprietor does a really good job in this one too.So perhaps had they worked on the ending I would have enjoyed it more. The film plays out as kind of a dirtier version of Something Wicked This Way Comes, but with less chills. You never get a real sense of danger in this one as you really do not care about the group of friends except maybe the guy who keeps telling everyone they should leave, but they want to stay to find their friend, but not really. They all have kind of selfish reasons for wanting to find the girl and they all get what they deserve. This one might have been even better had they done it earlier as back in the day Full Moon films did not have enormous budgets, but more than the 120,000 this one had. They generally had 1,000,000 which may not sound a lot by today's standards, but could have helped this film out a lot as there is a cheapness about it. Still, it was kind of okay, just wish they worked on that ending a bit more.

Backlash007 Sideshow was one of the later Full Moon outings so that means it had a lot of potential to suck. It did, but it's better than most of the drivel they were putting out around this time (Ragdoll, I'm talking about you). We've got the usual 30-somethings masquerading as high school students who visit a traveling carnival and become permanent members of the freak show. The make-up isn't that bad, but some of the freaks don't make sense. I mean, Digestina? She lives in a vat of stomach acid and excretes toasters. What the hell? About the acting, let's just say it was bad and leave it at that. Phil Fondacaro is my favorite minuscule actor and he's the only one coming off as a professional. The movie ended very abruptly and just left me feeling stupid for watching it. But what else did I expect from a Fred Olen Ray movie? Oh, and I almost forgot Brinke Stevens is wasted in a bit cameo. The Videozone after the feature was very informative, however. It revealed that Fred Olen Ray was at one time a carnie. I knew it all along!!!

capkronos While marginally better than most of director Fred Olen Ray's and executive producer Charles Band's most recent output, SIDESHOW still emerges as only a mediocre rendering of a decent concept.Five teens (two guys and two girls on blind dates and the wheelchair-bound kid brother of one of the boys) spend the evening at a traveling carnival and end up p1ssing off dwarf Abbot Graves (Phil Fondacaro, the contemporary answer to Angelo Rossitto), who runs the "Doctor Graves Horrors of Nature" sideshow exhibit--an attraction which features such freaks as Conjoin-O (a guy with a monster in his belly), Aelita the inside-out girl, Hans the bug boy and Digestina (a woman who lives in a pool of digestive fluid) (?!) Abbot doesn't take too kindly to being pushed around by one of the kids and decides to get even with them all by turning their worst fears or insecurities into reality.The characters aren't fully developed enough to get elicit much sympathy or interest and their eventual transformations are unfortunately rather predictable (a girl who hates being touched is turned into a doll in a glass cage, another who is insecure about her body is turned into a faceless woman with a nice body, etc.), but the film is reasonably well-made given the budget, the acting is acceptable and the make-up FX by Gabe Bartalos are pretty good. Also bit parts are played by Ray regulars Ross Hagen (as the sheriff), Brinke Stevens (fortune teller), Pete Spellos (freak with a monster in his belly) and Richard Gabai (game huckster).

brandonsites1981 A group of teenagers mess with the ringleader of a freak sideshow and of course the ringleader takes it upon himself to teach the teenagers a nasty lesson.Brinke Stevens is totally wasted in a cameo performance, the ending is terrible, and the special effects are pretty sorry, even by Fred Olen Ray's standards. Rent Jack-O or Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers instead.Rated R for Nudity, Language, Graphic Violence, and a Mild Sexual Situation.