What makes it different from others?

Really Surprised!

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The circus tent had been the stage for violence and melodrama ever since the Lon Chaney vehicle THE UNKNOWN (1927); as late as 1966, there had been the average Edgar Wallace yarn starring Christopher Lee CIRCUS OF FEAR – most notoriously, however, was CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960), whose grisliness matches that of HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)…with which the film under review shares its producer (Herman Cohen) and male lead (the late Michael Gough). Still, the latter's appearance here is rather brief – being merely a victim of the killer-on-the-loose this time around: his demise (the back of his head is perforated by a large nail hammered through the hole in a block of wood against which he was resting!), however, is almost as outrageous as the spiked binoculars from BLACK MUSEUM! Anyway, the true star here is Joan Crawford (61 years old but still showing off her legs!) – going through her horror (and final) phase: in fact, she would bow out in 1970 with TROG i.e. yet another (and even more preposterous) Cohen/Gough offering! She is the owner of a traveling circus (eventually joined by rebellious daughter Judy Geeson, who would soon flourish within the genre herself) whose star attractions and associates begin to die on her. Their non-accidental nature obviously draws the Police to the tent (represented by Robert Hardy, later of Hammer's DEMONS OF THE MIND [1972])…but Crawford herself is unperturbed, as she relishes the mass of crowds coming in every night in the hope of capturing another sensational 'accident' live! Needless to say, her callousness makes her the No. 1 suspect, especially after her rival for new performer Ty Hardin's attentions, Diana Dors (in one of the last roles where she would retain her last shapely figure), is literally sawed in half! As often happens with this type of fare, a dwarf virtually acts as Chorus throughout the proceedings; still, the identity of the killer was not hard to guess – especially since this particular character's grudge against Crawford (however honest it may have been) is spelt out some time before the actual denouement!

The circus. Bodies are beginning to pile up and Joan Crawford owns the joint! Crawford must have thought that it's about 20 years earlier and she is back on "Flamingo Road." Unfortunately, for her she wasn't.Crawford leads a very much unknown cast with the exception of Judy Geeson, who became popular thanks to To Sir, With Love vehicle around the same time.The film does start off intriguing enough with horrendous deaths at the circus. These accidents are an absolute horror. Perhaps, it would have been better if the British police had thrown their hands up and called in Jessica Fletcher to solve the mystery.The ending is abrupt and very quickly done. It did not tie all loose ends together. How could the murderer have been in two places at one time?

Berserk is not as dreadful as I had anticipated. It's a straightforward and reasonably entertaining whodunit set in a traveling circus in Britain. Overall I wouldn't call the pacing slow, as others have, but it is odd. At the beginning the story moves along briskly, as the plot quickly thickens. Then periodically it breaks for extended circus acts that have no bearing on the story, though it could be argued that since we are half expecting a new murder to occur at any moment, we have no choice but to be attentive. Certainly this wouldn't be much of a film without the centerpiece, Joan Crawford, who delivers a forceful performance as the hardboiled boss of the circus. Over sixty, her hair is dyed pinkish blonde and worn tightly pulled back to emphasize her still attractive facial features (and possibly to lift the face) and in half her scenes she is wearing a mistress-of-ceremonies outfit with bare legs. She could still pull it off. But one notices several instances of "Joan Crawford lighting" that started in the 50s if not earlier: in these instances the upper part of her face is high lit but there is a convenient shadow under the chin to de-emphasize the sagging jawline. (These days the average actress of 60-plus has had surgical facelifts.) The tone of her acting here is very much like the performance she gave around the same period on the CBS soap opera The Secret Storm in which she subbed for her ailing daughter who was a regular cast member of the show: full throttle whether necessary or not – but you got your money's worth or at least felt you were being generously served by the performer.Ty Hardin as a high wire performer who sort of has the hots for Joan (we really can't tell because the script coyly dances around the issue) was on a career downturn at the time this was made and doesn't make much of an impression here. Diana Dors as an abrasive member of Crawford's troupe of performers enlivens every scene she's in. Just when you think she is stealing the film, in steps Crawford to show everyone who's the Star. The production values are cheap but so well presented that they almost look expensive. Shooting actual circus acts lends an air of plausibility to the film as a whole that the script itself lacks, and one can understand the logic of approaching the production from this angle. If you cut out all of the genuinely interesting circus material this would be very thin gruel indeed. The scoring is also peculiar. Usually it's par-for-the-course sinister/suspenseful. But sometimes it veers off into a lush studio orchestra sound of the kind you'd expect to hear as underscoring to a scene of a limo gliding to a stop in front of a Beverly Hills mansion wherein Lana Turner is longing for love. This disconcerting shift occurs right after the dandy opening scene and credits.Crawford seems in her element here as a tough lady with responsibilities and she is the main reason to see the film.

Joan Crawford's next to last feature film Berserk finds her as boss lady of a circus where a string of murders is being committed. I will say the best thing about Berserk is the circus acts from the Billy Smart Circus where the film was shot in the United Kingdom.As for the film it's your usual slasher flick that could have, but didn't come from Hammer Studios. The whole cast with the exception of Crawford and Ty Hardin playing the hunky high wire artist were from Great Britain and the continent. Hardin's one daring dude, his high wire act not only consists of no net, but he walks underneath a row of very sharp spikes. There's no surviving if he falls.And there's a rapid rate of homicide at Crawford's show unless Scotland Yard in the person of Inspector Robert Hardy can figure out who is killing off the circus, a bit at a time.Maybe Berserk might have been better had Hammer Films actually had done this production. This was the kind of thing they were good at, even if the villain isn't a supernatural one. I will say that the death of Michael Gough is a shocking and original one. You might want to catch Berserk for that alone.As it is there are more red herrings thrown up as potential suspects in Berserk than at feeding time at Marineland.You'll go Berserk just trying to figure it all out.