'Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood’ (1973) - Christopher Speeth. 

 The weary Norris family gain employment in a freakishly dilapidated amusement park run in a somewhat desultory manner by the cadaverous proprietor, Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey) fatefully taking residence there in the hope of discovering the whereabouts of their missing son, but instead unearthing an unspeakably lurid B-movie bacchanal of surrealistic subterranean savagery more than worthy of gaudy schlock-instigator, Andy Milligan or chaotic psychotronic prankster, Ray Dennis Steckler, with an appropriately Rollercoaster-like alacrity the anxious family unsettlingly find themselves beleaguered by the increasingly nightmarish plasma craving parasites that prowl nightly in ‘Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood’.

Director, Christopher Speeth’s singularly sinister, frequently outlandish, playfully perverse, outré horror extravaganza has a decidedly warped, Todd Browning-infused Gothic dissonance that eerily imbues the shambling, decayed Amusement Park with a palpably unsettling threat of inevitable doom! A truly demented diorama wherein unspeakably vile, dark-dwelling wraiths lurk and gibber insensibly in the labyrinthine voids of this despicable, far from genteel locale; these pallid, cannibalistically-inclined ghouls all under the maniacal thrall of that eldritch, moustachioed arch fiend, Malatesta himself!!!

While the actors performances are uniformly exuberant, with misanthropic, Mr. Blood and the truly wretched wastrel, Mr. Stick (William Preston) expressing the film’s more refined theatrical sensibilities, the real stars of the fantastically skewed, psychedelically lewd ‘Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood’ are the actively malevolent locations and the vividly imaginative art direction of surreal visionaries ‘Alley Friends’, it is their phantasmagorical explosions of garish idiosyncrasy that makes, Christopher Speeth’s kaleidoscopic Carnival of carnivorous calamity such an unforgettably bizarre cinematic experience. 

'Perhaps, even an esoteric genre unto itself, the artfully strange nightmare ‘Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood’ is most certainly not for the faint of mind, and while the cost of entry might initially appear to be a mere bagatelle, the price of your exit could prove infinitely steeper than you could possibly imagine! - This is the Van Der Graf Generator of progressive 70s avant-garde horror!' - Weirdlingwolf.