BaronBl00d Well, to keep the puns going, this grows on you after awhile. Really, it does. While I had never heard of it before, I was pleasantly surprised to find this film about a British bio-engineer/professor mixed up with a carnival and who uses bodies(inexplicably) to help with his experimentation to create an animal/plant race of beings. We get a Frankenstein type film, but when you add the oddities(most REAL) from the carnival - and who create scenes eerily reminiscent of Tod Browning's Freaks - we get so much more. While undeniably cheaply made - the special effects are ridiculous as is the final "invention" of man and plant, The Mutations(I saw it under the title The Freakmaker)does have some truly jarring scenes. The carnival freaks in this movie are allowed to act - and, quite frankly, are the scariest thing in this film as they lynch Lynch(played nicely by a heavily made-up Tom Baker - make-up here is quite good too!) - a deformed man who wants to be 'normal" whilst distancing himself from his freak brethren by calling them freaks and himself normal. Needless to say things do not work out well for him. This is the subplot of the film but I found it more interesting than the story of Donald Pleasance working with plants and creating some starved half-animal half-plant creature the size of a human. Pleasence is good as he always is - but really is given little to do EXCEPT for his wonderful lecture at the beginning of the film. There we are also introduced to four students(later Brad Harris will join them)who will come to know the doctor's work firsthand. The only thing you need to know about these four is that three of them are HOT, beautiful girls: blonde Jill Haworth, sensuous Olga Anthony, and the incredibly stunning Julie Ege - we also get to see them in various states of disrobe - a MAJOR highlight. Harris is OK, but it really is the real-life "freaks" that caught my eye. Michael Dunn plays the dwarf running the carnival - and I think he gives his best performance in film. I always thought he was a pretty good actor that went beyond his stereotyped image. This unfortunately was one of his last films as he died at the age of 38. The Mutations is a solid film with many undesirable elements but does, in my opinion, scare - why? Well, that will be for you to determine.

Coventry This grotesquely mad and slightly sick-spirited early 70's horror film couldn't count on too much praise from either the critics or the audiences, and there are a couple of (justified) reasons for this. First and foremost, director Jack Cardiff never really makes clear what his intentions are. Does he want "The Mutations" to be a cheesy and obviously fictional Sci-Fi horror flick about a mad scientist performing absurd experiments to create a new race of human vegetables? Or perhaps it was meant to be a harrowing and truly devastating portrait about the position of gruesomely deformed people in contemporary society, somewhat like Tod Browning's legendary classic "Freaks"? Either way, these two extreme themes are practically impossible to fold together and the film ends up somewhere in no man's land. Nonetheless it contains several genuinely disturbing and jaw-dropping moments, most notably when the collection of traveling circus freaks exhibits themselves and – in true Browning style – wreaks havoc on those who mistreated them. The whole plot is actually secondary to these sequences! The always-reliable Donald Pleasance stars as a nutball professor destined to integrate human tissue in his experiments of plant-mutation. Therefore he commands the horribly deformed & vicious owner of a circus to abduct human guinea pigs (students attending his own university lectures, which isn't that smart) and bring them to his private lab. When the experiments go inevitably wrong, resulting in a lizard-skinned girl and a male kind of Venus flytrap, Professor Pleasance just 'donates' them again to the circus as new attractions. Fellow students begin to search for their missing friends and, meanwhile, the circus' "natural" freaks plot to punish their cruel employer. The best sequence in "The Mutations" is a more than obvious tribute to the aforementioned "Freaks" and involves an attempt by the deformed people to befriend Lynch; nicknamed "the ugliest man in the world" (and he really is). One of us! One of us!! Whenever the action takes place outside of the circus tent, the film is pretty much scare-free and mildly tedious. Giant and clearly fake vegetable-monsters simply aren't creepy and several little (and stupid) details in the script just can't be true. Like biology students driving Jaguars, for example! Tod Browning's milestone once got banned for over 40 years and it nearly cost him his career, supposedly all because his portrayal of deformed people was exploitative and unacceptable. Once you see "The Mutations", you'll acknowledge that Browning's film actually is the complete opposite of exploitative! He tried to put the emphasis on how independent, courageous and perfectly able to function they are, whereas Jack Cardiff's picture really exploits the spectacle and questionable "entertainment"-value of these people's condition.

gridoon Mostly dry and boring horror film, with shoddy special effects - yet quite creepy if you let your imagination do the film's work for you. It all seems quite disturbing on paper (mutated man-plants, sideshow "freaks", etc.), but the film's only real merit is another good performance by the ever-reliable Donald Pleasence. For a genuinely engrossing and dramatic "mutation picture", I recommend the original "Fly" (1958). (**)

Wilbur-10 This is a totally bizarre British horror film which deserves cult status of the highest order - I can't believe that this didn't have problems with the censor, it is a disturbing, nasty piece of work and should undoubtedly have cult status.'The Mutations' has Donald Pleasence as a Frankenstein-inspired scientist, Prof Nolter, who in-between his lecturing is trying to fuse humans with plantlife, to create a creature which has the strengths of both species. The nature of the film is introduced early, with a travelling funfair complete with freaks ( played by real-life freaks as in Tod Brownings early classic ), and a hideously ugly normal-sized man, who moonlights as Prof Nolter's assistant.The film has so many points of interest its difficult to know where to start - the similarities to 'Freaks' are acknowledged with a feast scene which includes the line "He's one of us - we accept you". The freaks are also shown to have more humanity than the other characters, although they do turn on their tormenter in the end, in a scene similar to the climactic chase in 'Freaks'.There are also ideas and scenes close to the French classic 'Eyes without a Face'; Pleasance portrays a character similar to Pierre Brasseur's mad doctor, both living in a secluded mansion complete with pack of mad dogs.As if all this were not enough, we are also treated to Julie Ege as the screaming heroine, showing of her acting limitations and bodily curves very nicely - special applause for the nude bath scene.'The Mutations' is a real shocker, which viewed today has a strong impact - far more so than more famous 'shocking' films, like 'The Devils' and the earlier 'Peeping Tom', both of which viewed now seem relatively tame.While not raising the film to any artistic height - it is a cheap 'B' Movie in all production areas - the film should really be seen by all film fans, and given its deserved status as a heavyweight of the gutter-horror genre.