Freaks was made in 1931 as a blatantly exploitative movie which attempted to cash in on the then-current vogue of horror-monster movies by making a movie featuring REAL freaks -- midgets, pinheads, legless and armless people; the lot.

Director Tod Browning ended up with a turkey on his hands. The film offended most audiences everywhere. Half-an-hour was sliced from its running time when it gained its limited release across America. In Britain it was banned, and the ban stayed in force for more than 30 years.

But in the 1980s the movie was rediscovered. It became a cult-classic, even though most prints were as dark and murky as the plot.

Now Warners bring us an immaculate (for the period) print of Freaks, and it stands today as one of the most unusual, strangest movies ever made, and one which is strangely compelling.

The story is set in an amazing carnival of freaks (and Tod Browning assembled America's greatest sideshow performers of that time for this movie). Little midget Hans (Harry Earles, who later was one of the three main munchkins in The Wizard of Oz has fallen in love with the glamorous trapeze-artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). She at first is merely amused -- until she discovers little Hans has come into money.

She plots with the carnival Strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor) to pretend to fall in love with Hans and wrest the money from him. But her duplicity is exposed, and exposed too is her contempt for the sideshow freaks. In an apocalyptic closing scene, they wreak their terrible revenge. Cleopatra is left alive ...... but what is left of her is truly a freak.

Freaks is insanely freaky, with its cast of deformed characters including retarded microencephalics (pinheads), strange bird-women, living-skeletons, armless and legless torsos and midgets. But though it shocks, it is at the same time quite moving. And by its close, you appreciate the freaks for their basic humanity -- which is, even today, quite an achievement.

Compared to other versions I've seen of this classic, this Warners transfer is a miracle. It shows its age, but the black-and-white tones are beautifully rendered; shadow details are crisp and the murky tones of earlier prints are totally banished.

The mono sound is of course dated and dynamically restricted, but is for its time really excellent, with little audible damage or hiss.

The special feature Dark Carnival - The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre clocks in at 66 minutes, which is six minutes longer than the feature. It's as compelling as the movie, with a close look at each freak featured in the movie.

There's also a special message prologue which was tagged onto the start of the movie in some theatres, in an event to persuade audiences that this was not an exploitative flick. And three alternate endings, each less explicit than the previous one, are shown -- the least explicit version was used for commercial release.