In 1937 a circus clown is drafted into battle against fascist forces in Spain. He wears his full clown outfit as he wades through the enemy soldiers hacking at them with a machete. Years later in 1973, his son carries on the family tradition and becomes a clown too – the Sad Clown. In the circus he works at he comes into contact with the sociopath Smiling Clown and his beautiful girlfriend, Natalia, the trapeze artist. Very soon, violent jealousies erupt between the clowns and a maelstrom of insane violence ensues.

It's difficult to say if there is an underlying message in The Last Circus. The Spanish Civil War is a backdrop, as is Franco's Spain but to be perfectly honest, if there is a message, it's lost in the mayhem. But this doesn't matter because the movie works best if you take it at face value. It's a Felliniesque melodrama about violent clowns fighting over a gorgeous girl. The tone of the film alternates radically and without warning between funny and vicious. Sometimes they overlap, like when the Smiling Clown beats the Sad Clown to a pulp with a fairground hammer, in doing so hitting the winning bell; he is dragged away from the battered body of his victim while shouting 'I want my teddy!'. This sort of juxtaposing of extreme violence with silly comedy is something that happens throughout The Last Circus and may very well leave some viewers baffled. But for fans of cult cinema this approach should not be much of a problem I would venture. The Last Circus does seem to show again that when it comes to surrealism, the Spanish sure know how to deliver. From the start this is evident. In the incredibly great opening credit sequence we have military style drums hammering away while we are bombarded with an over the top array of bewildering imagery – from black and white photographs of Civil War Spain, to a still of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. juxtaposed immediately with a gruesome shot from the Italian gore-fest Cannibal Holocaust. It's one of the most arresting credit sequences I can ever remember seeing – thematically it's difficult to say what it means but it terms of visual artistry it's terrific.

Acting personnel all do excellent work in bizarre roles. But special notice needs to be made for Carolina Bang for also being quite ridiculously attractive throughout – it's quite easy to see why she has driven these psychopathic clowns to such crazed distraction. Director Álex de la Iglesia has to be given credit too for bringing all this madness to the screen with such style and verve. He has created a film here that in all honesty is very difficult to categorise in terms of genre – there's a little bit of war, quite a lot of comedy, a good deal of melodrama and a host of extreme gruesomeness; but it does not fit into any one genre very well at all, in truth this is one of the things that makes it good. If I had a criticism it would be that the final third loses a little impetus but that's mainly because the opening two thirds is so wild and strong. The Last Circus comes highly recommended for fans of psychotronic cinema.

To watch this movie and enjoy it one must suspend all judgment.

It doesn't pretend to show us scenes of everyday living, or the girl next door shopping at the supermarket.

It deals with the same magic world that García Márquez deals with in his exotic novels. Marvellously created world. As thrilling as any Fellini movie. The circus world is the perfect setting for developing this view, between fantasy, nightmares and awful reality.

The pacing is relentless, a thousand things happening during the 120 minutes or so, all of them linked within the main story and showing a whole range of human emotions among the three main characters: The Smiling Clown, The Sad Clown (his sidekick) and the beautiful trapeze girl, the object of jealousy, fury, rancor between the two clowns.

Every scene is visually baroque in essence, since action takes place in the foreground but also in the background, with secondary characters.

There is a full color palette, dazzling as an old kaleidoscope making all sorts of beautiful patterns that change in front of our eyes delighting us continuously.

The acting is superb, from the principal actors to the last extra. The delivery of the lines in Spanish is done at full speed, clean as a whistle and sharp as a cracking whip by all the actors.

The digital effects perfect. Top entertainment from beginning to end. What a SEN-SA-TION-AL movie!!!

In 1937 Madrid, Republican militia conscripts circus performers to fight against the fascist forces. They are overrun and captured. The funny clown tells his son Javier to only be a Sad Clown because there is no happiness. It's 1973. Javier joins a ramshackle circus as a Sad Clown. He falls in love with the wildly beautiful aerial silk acrobat Natalia. Only she's the girlfriend of the volatile possessive owner lead clown Sergio.

This is a wild outlandish movie. It's got great stuff but rambling and uneven at times. It opens with a crazy machete wielding clown action scene. That sets up a surreal violent horror but then it turns into something slightly different. It becomes a romantic melodrama with violence. Then the last act turns back into more surreal violent chaos. The changes in the style does hold it back but this is a movie of an original vision.