THE LAST CIRCUS (Balada triste de trompeta) (2010)

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Director: Álex de la Iglesia
Cast: Carlos Areces, Antonio De la Torre, Carolina Bang, Manuel Tallafé, Alejandro Tejerías, Manuel Tejada, Enrique Villén
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Rating: R21 (Some Sexual Scenes and Violence)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website: http://baladatristedetrompeta.blogspot.com/

Opening Day: 5 April 2012 (EXCLUSIVELY AT SHAW THEATRES LIDO)

Synopsis: The circus monkeys scream wildly inside their cage while, outside, men kill and die in another circus: The Spanish Civil War. The Stupid Clown, recruited forcefully by the Militia, ends up carrying out a bloodbath with a machete against the National soldiers while still wearing his clown costume. Many years later, during Franco’s time, Javier, son of the clown in the Militia, finds work as the Sad Clown in a circus where he meets an outlandish cast of strange characters such as the Human Cannonball, the Elephant Tamer or a quarrelsome couple of dog trainers. Here he also crosses paths for the first time with Sergio.

This is the beginning of the story in which Javier and Sergio, two terrifyingly disfigured clowns, pushed by rage, desperation and lust, battle to the death hoping to win the love of the most beautiful and cruel woman in the circus.

Movie Review:

The last movie that had scary clowns and frightened the hell out of me was IT. Then came this black comedy of horrific proportions that will make any gorehound happy. But if you're meek like me, you'll likely be covering your eyes through most of its running time.

Directed by the celebrated and wildly imaginative Alex de la Iglesia, The Last Circus is unlike anything you've seen in recent memory. Audacious and relentless in its violence, it is unabashedly bloodsoaked with the body count increasing exponentially towards the end. Like an early Takashi Miike movie.

Indubitably an allegory of the '70s Franco-era Spain, the movie will likely mean more to a Spaniard than a casual filmgoer who has no idea of the nation's historical entrenchments. Like me. Until I did some snooping.

Iglesia frames the nation's troubled history with a tortured love triangle involving a trio of circus performers, in the basest of namecalling, 'Psycho Clown', 'Dumb Girl' and 'Sad Clown'. 'Psycho Clown' represents Fascist authoritarianism while 'Dumb Girl' is the masochistic motherland. 'Sad Clown' most likely stands in for the common man, who has endured generations of repressive regimes. Through 'Sad Clown''s transformation from a timid nomad to a gun-toting mass murderer, we see that the common man gets caught up in the senseless violence and inevitably becomes a purveyor of violence himself.

Some scenes are difficult to stomach, such as the ones where 'Psycho Clown' brutally rapes 'Dumb Girl' and beats 'Sad Clown' to a pulp in an amusement park. But it is when 'Sad Clown', the movie's only likeable character, turns into a bloodthirsty killer that the movie goes into full-blown lunacy.

Despite the skin-crawling graphic maimings, Iglesia thankfully injects some biting humour in the proceedings, giving the scenes a satirical edge. So the violence doesn't seem pointless or gratuitous. Using magical realism, Iglesia re-enacts real historical moments, i.e. the Spanish Civil War and Prime Minister Admiral Luis Carreo Blanco's assassination in Madrid to give the largely fantastical story relevancy.

But amidst all the abject 'human ugliness' the movie portrays, you get a sense they have been meticulously choreographed with original style and vivid imagination. Oddball moments such as 'Sad Clown' dashing through a forest butt-naked serve are wonderfully surrealistic. 'Beautifully grotesque' is the most apt way to describe this ceaselessly surprising movie that also serves as a plangent critique of a tumultuous time.

It's no wonder Quentin Tarantino fell in love with it.

Movie Rating:

(If you thirst for something original and have a strong stomach for queasy violence, you won't want to miss this)

Review by Adrian Sim