By Geno McGahee
Ray Bradbury obviously had a hard on for carnivals. In 1983, he wrote SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and that movie was terrible despite the fact that a carnival is the ideal setting for a horror movie. Seven years after that flick, perhaps Bradbury wanted to redeem himself with THE BLACK FERRIS, a tale about a carnival with many similarities to the movie, or he may have just run out of ideas.
Hank (Zachary Bennett), a young boy, has been sneaking into the shut-down carnival and spying on Mr. Cooger (Frank Whitton). Every night, Cooger takes a ride on the Ferris wheel and as it goes in reverse, he gets younger. I think we can all guess how this one will end. After he turns young, he visits an old woman and steals from her and then back to the Ferris wheel he goes to become old again.
Hank teams up with his friend, Pete (Nathaniel Moreau), to stop Cooger from stealing the jewelry from the old woman, and they plan to expose him for the fraud he is. You would think that a man that has a machine that makes him younger would not have to steal jewelry. Perhaps he could come up with a better plan. I imagine that the electricity to run the Ferris wheel night after night might be more value than the shitty jewelry he was able to take. Why didn’t he find some old rich guys and offer them youth in exchange for a mountain of money. Perhaps Bradbury was sniffing glue when he wrote this one.
The kids ambush the carnival and now Cooger is stuck on the Ferris wheel going in the normal direction, but this is how he gets older and now he is quickly changing to an old man and then eventually turning into a skeleton and dropping the bag of jewelry. How sad. All that trouble for maybe 200 bucks worth of jewelry. I wonder what Mr. Cooger was going to use that money for. Why did he need it so badly and why not just show up at the old lady’s house, punch her in the stomach and take it? Why go through all that fuss?
Outside of theft, Cooger didn’t do anything wrong. Did he deserve death for taking jewelry? I think not. The boys could have gone to the police and reported their findings and then let the authorities deal with him. They didn’t have to break his Ferris wheel and send him to death. I’m hoping that his buddy can still slam that thing into reverse and bring him back, but I’m not sure if it’s possible if he is dead.
THE BLACK FERRIS is a pretty neat tale, but this is another case of kids being rewarded for doing bad things. In another tale, a man moved into a boarding house and was killed by a kid after doing nothing wrong, but the kid was cheered on by the adults. Now we have two kids basically killing a guy for stealing, and I’m not sure that the old lady didn’t tell him that he could have the jewelry. Maybe he was going to take her on the Ferris wheel in exchange. Who knows? Freaking kids.
Rating: 7/10
