i have to know, is there a difference between carnival magic and shadow magic? its for my studies
Hmm, while there is a bit of overlap between shadow magic and carnival magic, carnival magic tends to be a lot more colourful!! And it usually has 100% more clowns involved. If there's not at least one clown present when practising carnival magic, then it can veer off into shadow magic, so be careful.
Combining shadow magic and carnival magic leads to some very powerful spells indeed. This is done by having say, a half clown, half wizard, perform the spell. A clowizard, perhaps. Dark carnival magic is dangerous, and happens to be my favourite type of magic! <]:•}
Thank you very much for the question, hope your studies are going well!
In which we are wrong about scheduling, we explore the obvious curse hanging over this movie, science does not work that way, somehow Umbrella Corp and Silent Hill are involved, and a lotta grumblin' like a chimp.
Those of us who have heard of Al Adamson tend to associate him with movies like Psycho-A-Go-Go and Blood of Dracula’s Castle, so it’s weird to see him trying to make a family-friendly talking animal movie. He fails at it, of course, but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with the genre. Al Adamson just wasn’t any good at making movies.
Markov the Magnificent is a carnival magician who can talk to animals. You’d think he’d use that in his act but instead he mostly just annoys the other performers until they insist he be fired. This leads to the secret coming out… but it’s not Markov’s powers that are revealed, it’s those of his buddy Alex the Chimp, an animal who can talk to people. With Alex on stage, and Markov finally using some of his mind-reading and spoon-bending abilities, the carnival is suddenly the biggest thing in town. Unfortunately, some of the attention they attract is the wrong kind, like that of a scientist who would like nothing better than to dissect a live chimpanzee, I guess just because it’s the evilest possible thing to do.
Out of curiosity, have any of you ever seen a chimpanzee in a zoo? If so, you may have been surprised that it didn't look like the ones you see in movies. Movie chimps are skinny and pink, while zoo chimps are dark grey and look like they could tie you in a knot with one hand while lifting a small car with the other. Why is that? Because every chimp you've ever seen in a movie, tv show, commercial, or circus is less than about seven years old. When chimps reach puberty they not only become much bigger and stronger, they quickly realize that humans are smaller and weaker, and it gets very difficult to convince them to wear cute costumes anymore.
A movie about saving a talking animal from evil scientists so he can pursue a career in show business sounds like it ought to be fun, I guess. It would probably work better as a cartoon, where we could be confident that no real animals were abused in the making of it. Even so, most of what actually happens in Carnival Magic is just kind of dull and depressing. Occasionally you do get an attempt at something ‘zany’, but it never quite lives up to the kind of antics a description of the plot would lead you to expect. When Alex decides to steal a car and go for a joyride, for example, that sounds like it ought to be funny, but it somehow just never works. The music is an oddly un-fitting banjo piece and the screaming girl in the back seat reminds us constantly how dangerous this would be in real life.
(If you’ve ever tried to look up this movie on Wikipedia, by the way, you will have doubtless discovered that Carnival Cruise Lines owns a ship called the Carnival Magic. Should I ever find myself on board, I believe I will decline any offer to dine with the captain.)
When Alex is not getting up to supposedly hilarious hijinks, the movie has two modes. One is pastel people wandering around the carnival apparently having fun, and the other is the various characters telling us about their traumatic backstories. Markov’s pregnant wife died in a car wreck, leaving him with nothing but a talking ape and a broken heart. Stoney the carnival owner forces his daughter to dress and behave like a boy so she won’t remind him of the wife who left him. The carnival publicist ran away from home to escape a controlling and abusive father, and so on.
Of course you can make movies about this stuff. People make some very good movies about this stuff. Most of those movies, however, do not include scenes of chimpanzees wearing bras on their heads. Seeing this kind of material in Carnival Magic makes it feel like we just tuned in to that hilarious sitcom our friends have been urging us to watch, only to catch the Very Special Episode in which one of the characters did drugs or had cancer and then it was never mentioned again.
I think the ending is supposed to be about the entire carnival coming together to save Alex from the evil scientist, but we haven’t seen any sign that Alex has unified them. The people around Markov are already his friends and already committed to the survival of the carnival as a whole. If Alex had inspired carnies who were on the point of running away to become accountants or something to remain with the show that would be one thing, and they do succeed in saving Alex, but the scene is presented as if it’s a climax without a story. It’s also absolutely ridiculous watching the carnies sneak up on the secret chimp dissection lab, because they’re all very ordinary, out-of-shape people in street clothes doing their best to act like they’re on a police raid.
The evil scientist, Dr. Poole, is kind of a strange inclusion, himself. In my review of Octaman I remarked on how a lot of movies set up a conflict between scientists who want to study something and showpeople who want to ruthlessly exploit it. The 70’s King Kong remake is a pretty good example, but in that movie – and in many others – those who want to put some oddity on display for money are the bad guys and those who want to learn from it are good. Carnival Magic inverts this by suggesting that to study something is to destroy it, whereas to show it off is to help it be enjoyed by all the world.
There is a point to be made here. A fair bit of what we know about anatomy and physiology of both humans and other creatures has been learned by doing atrocious things to both the living and the dead. I don’t think, however, that Carnival Magic was the right way to make that point. For one thing, Dr. Poole’s desire to dissect Alex alive makes no sense. It’s not Alex’ physiology that makes him remarkable, it’s his behaviour. Watching him alive could surely teach us infinitely more than taking his corpse apart.
For another, the options we’re given is Alex being a specimen or Alex being a literal circus freak! Arguing that science should leave an animal alone to live out a happy life in its natural habitat seems reasonable – telling science to leave the same creature alone so it can perform for crowds of strangers is kind of horrifying. It’s like if Free Willy ended with the titular whale returned to the aquarium having been saved from a taxidermist or something. Sure, it’s better than death, but the audience still knows that this is not what’s best for this creature. If we’re supposed to believe that Alex wants to be a star, then that should have been established at the beginning of the movie, perhaps by him escaping Markov’s trailer and trying to entertain people. One or two short extra scenes about this would have made the whole arc much more palatable.
Several characters describe Alex as being something more than an animal, so I think we’re supposed to regard him as a character in his own right. This doesn’t seem entirely successful, because Alex doesn’t come across as having goals or desires of his own. He happily goes along with whatever Markov wants to do, and when Markov’s not around he wanders about getting into mischief with no real sense of direction. Part of me wants to believe this is an intentional attempt to portray a non-human mind that simply doesn’t prioritize the way we do. Another part just wants to call it bad writing and I’m not sure which I ought to listen to.
As characters go, Markov’s not a great one, either. Main characters in a movie ought to have a chance to learn and change, but Markov is pretty much the only human in the movie who doesn’t. Ellen learns to break free of her father and become her own person, and Stoney learns that she can still love him regardless. Dave the PR guys learns to be patient with women. Kirk the tiger tamer grows more bitter and hateful until it destroys him, while his girlfriend Kim comes to realize what an ass he is. Markov is exactly the same at the end as he was at the beginning – a guy with weird powers that he doesn’t put to any good use, and a talking ape for a surrogate child. Perhaps nearly losing Alex is supposed to show him how much the chimp meant to him, but he already spent half the movie telling us that Alex is all he has. He knows he’s got issues related to the death of his wife but seems unwilling to move past them.
In my review of Cry Wilderness I noted that it edged out Carnival Magic for the coveted title of ‘Worst Fucking Movie of Season 11’ mainly by being more racist. There’s a bit of racism in Carnival Magic, too, and it’s got a similar flavor although it’s not nearly so all-pervasive. Cry Wilderness had its slightly magical Native Americans, here to help and support the white people. Carnival Magic mostly cannot be bothered to have anybody who isn’t white say lines, but it still manages to have its slightly magical Buddhist Monks who raised Markov and presumably taught him his powers. This is dumb, and actor Don Stewart sounds like even he doesn’t believe it.
Considered as a whole, Carnival Magic is pretty messy and never manages to settle on a tone. Alex’ antics, Kirk’s revenge, and the various personal stories don’t quite feel like they’re all part of the same narrative. If I go back to that ‘sitcom’ metaphor, it’s like several episodes combined into a movie, but instead of being stitched end-to-end like in Riding With Death, they’ve been intercut to look like they’re all going on at once and it still doesn’t feel like a unified whole. Yet for all that, there’s something weirdly fascinating about it. Maybe it’s the contrast between the cheerful carnival setting and the often dark personal stories. Maybe it’s trying to puzzle out what Adamson hoped to accomplish by the juxtaposition. Whatever it is, it’s another reason I’d rather re-watch this than Cry Wilderness.
