Woke up this Valentine Day's way ahead of the rest of the human occupants in the house - not an unusual weekend occurrence, actually - so I did what I often do on a Saturday a.m.: sat with a cuppa joe, plus some bagels & cream cheese, and I watched a cheesy DVD. This week's selection came courtesy of exploitation archivists Something Weird: 1967's She Freak, a low-rent rewrite of Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks that was scripted and produced by David F Friedman, a prolific exploitation producer who also helped to unleash Herschell Gordon Lewis' goreflix, Blood Feast and 2,000 Maniacs on an unsuspecting drive-in audience.

Freak tells the story of Jade Cochran (Claire Brennan), a trampy Texas waitress with a fondness for posing in front of lighting that'll highlight the curves within her dress and a penchant for speaking into the camera and revealing her rather frightening incisors. As with Freaks, Jade's story is presented as a barker's spiel, something that may or may not be true. The movie opens with an extended montage of a carny setting (West Coast Carnival Shows let Friedman and director Byron Mabe film all over, so at least a third of the flick is devoted to dialog-free sequences taking advantage of the setting) then takes us into a Ten-in-One show where we glimpse a snake charmer plus a sword swallower, then a barker introducing a flashback build-up to the titular "she freak," who we won't see until the film's spine-chilling climax. (Kinda pointless, since her image was on the original movie poster and is plastered on the front of the DVD box, but that's par for this kinda low-budget job.)

When a carny advanced man arrives at the nowheresville cafe where Jade is waitressing, our anti-heroine is intriqued. She wants "something better," so naturally she takes a job as a waitress for the carnival's Midway Diner. (After the Mel Sharples type who runs the small Texas diner learns of her intentions, he freaks and calls her a "carnival tramp.") Once she's established in her new job, Jade befriends the carnival's "burly-cue" dancer (Lynn Courtney), then sets her sights on the most promising male in the vicinity, sideshow owner Steve St. John (Bill McKinley), all the while carrying on a tempestuous affair with a violent roustabout named Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond).

Though St. John's Ten-in-One is a big moneymaker, Jade is repulsed by the sight of the attractions. "They're human beings, just like you and me," St. John says, though we're never really shown that since the only sideshow freak on film throughout the movie is a cowboy hat-wearing midget named Shorty who's given maybe two lines of dialog. Unlike Freaks, which sympathetically focused on the lives of its sideshow performers, the spotlight here is on the essentially unlikable Jade. Perhaps scripter Friedman was working toward a Nightmare Alley morality fable of personal descent and degradation. More likely, the main reason we don't see the sideshow performers is it would've cost too much to put together a full Freaks ensemble.