A prime example of cheap, independently produced fodder aimed at the undemanding 1970s drive-in audiences, BARN OF THE NAKED DEAD is also more appropriately known under its original title and the one presented here on this DVD; TERROR CIRCUS. Also known as CAGED WOMEN and NIGHTMARE CIRCUS, there’s no “dead” (as in "living dead") and not much naked. The film’s credited director is one Alan Rudolph, a protégé of Robert Altman who went on to have a prominent career and has pretty much disowned this bleak maiden effort ever since.

Three attractive showgirls (Manuela Thiess, Sherry Alberoni, Gyl Roland) are en route to Las Vegas when their Ford station wagon breaks down in the middle of the highway. The next morning, a seemingly pleasant fellow named Andre (Andrew Pine) offers to help out and gives them a ride back to his homestead, which accommodates a lofty barn. In actuality, Andre is a disturbed (and apparently contaminated) individual with a sorted history, so he imprisons the trio of travelers in the barn, chained up with a handful of other young ladies who have crossed his path. The women are treated like pets in a circus, and to make the situation even wackier, since the barn is right next to a nuclear test site, Andre’s father (played by producer Gerald Cormier) is a raging killer mutant who is kept locked up in a tiny shed.

Bargain basement, bizarre, misogynistic, ludicrous and at times satirical, TERROR CIRCUS is the kind of movie that’s over before you’ve had any time to really think about it. The star of the film, Andrew Prine, was at the time in a succession of horror and exploitation roles, convincingly playing nutcases in SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES and THE CENTERFOLD GIRLS, so it’s no surprise to see him here dressing up like a ringmaster, taunting helpless scantily clad dames with leopards and boa constrictors, and whipping them relentlessly as they crawl about dog-collared like animals – in other words, this is a must-see for Andrew Prine fans.

With brief glimpses of gore, and even briefer glimpses of female nudity, the film is padded with Andre having delusions that one of the imprisoned women is his long lost mother (who apparently skipped town after his father’s unfortunate “accident”), failed attempted escapes by the hapless prisoners, and the subplot of an overly concerned agent (played by Chuck Niles, “Ivan” the black-coated zombie from Jerry Warren’s TEENAGE ZOMBIES) desperately searching for his three missing showgirl clients. Jennifer Ashley (THE CENTERFOLD GIRLS, TINTORERA, INSEMINOID), a drive-in movie queen in her own right, can be seen as a hippyish, spaced out captive. Byrd Holland and Douglas J. White, who worked together on the vampire masterwork LEMORA around the same period, are responsible for the assorted gore effects and the mutated dad monster make-up, which emerges effectively as seen here in this extremely clear transfer.

Previously available through a number of VHS companies and more recently a DVD under the “Barn” title through Legend Films, Media Blasters’ new special edition blows them all out of the water. Remastered from the original negatives in a 1.85:1 widescreen anamorphic transfer, TERROR CIRCUS looks strikingly better than ever before. Detail is very crisp and colors are bright, with only minor grain in darker scenes and some scattered speckling on the print source. The mono English audio is also clear with no noticeable setbacks.