A young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) survives a drag race accident that had the car she rode shotgun in toppling off a bridge and into a river below due to no apparent cause. Oddly unfazed and uninjured (except for the fact that she hardly remembers anything) by this incident, the woman heads across the country to her new job as a church organist, a job that puts her near a peculiar carnival. She experiences a number of strange things during her journey, including but not limited to a gaunt, ungainly man's appearance in her car and boarding house window. Director Herk Harvey plays The Man. Mary discovers a peculiar and deserted carnival after the incident with the man and becomes obsessed by it and the secrets it may hold. Mary begins to suspect that her survival of the accident was not as it appears.
The film begins all too abruptly and ends without so much as a "how do you do?" or an explanation as to what the hell you just watched. It raises more questions than its mere 84 minute runtime can answer and skips over whole scenes that might provide the audience with enough information to at least infer what the ending was. The biggest problem is that of Mary, who is a cynical, uncaring human being. Her friends (we assume they're her friends) both perish in the car accident but she shows no signs of survivor's guilt. She just starts off on her journey to Utah. She works as an organist at a church but hardly takes any stock in religion. To her a church is simply a place of business and only does what she does for the money. Her loner actions hardly make us care enough about her losing her mind. We get the sense that she wouldn't care if we were in her Twilight Zone wannabe situation. The film's tagline is, "She was a stranger among the Living." Never has a truer statement been said by a film marketing.
I want to talk about the horrible, terrible no good acting in this film. Every bit of dialogue spoken has the inflections of a bad dubbing. As far as I know the film was recorded in the English language. The only remotely good performance is by Harvey who never speaks. None of the people in the film are trained or established actors and Hilligoss herself only appeared credited in one other film. That was in 1964's The Curse of the Living Corpse. There's no reason to suspect that her performance in that film is any better. Just so you know it isn't.
Carnival of Souls is a pointless exercise in the mundane and illogical although it's far better than the 1998 remake.
★
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