Celluloid Heroes

Laugh while you-a can, Monkey Boy!

Mix theoretical physics, rock’n’roll, neurosurgery, Orson Welles and Rastafarian aliens from another dimension and you get this goofily eccentric genre-bending science-fiction action comedy. This is definitely one of those “love-it-or-hate-it” movies that you recommend to friends with caution. After watching this, they will either thank you profusely or recommend you for civil commitment.

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I’m not taking the vows. I’m only going to play the organ.

There is low-budget, ultra-low-budget and no-budget. I don’t know what term you’d use for a movie that could have been made with the change you dug out of your seat cushions. This is the only dramatic film made by industrial documentary filmmaker Herk Harvey, and you could be forgiven if you think you’re watching a lost episode of Twilight Zone. This simple but moody tale is as long on atmosphere as it is short on production values and running time.

Made for a paltry $30,000, Carnival of Souls was built around the dilapidated Saltair amusement park, which had been built by the Mormons on the shore of the Great Salt Lake during the late 19th Century. After decades of misfortune, fire, depression and war, it finally closed in the late 1950s. When Harvey spotted it while driving past, he thought the lonely structure, perched hundreds of feet from the receding shoreline it had once straddled, would make the perfect setting for a horror movie. He might have been on to something there.

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