A family is traveling the back roads of Florida for the father's book and decide to stop at a rundown sideshow. When their car breaks down the freaks come out to play, and they want women...
For some reason, I thought this was a Charles Band production so I always put off watching it, assuming it would be a cheap, boring movie filmed inside a dark tent for the whole thing. But thankfully Side Sho is an actual attempt at making a film.
Coming out a year after the Hills Have Eyes remake, it's clear where the inspiration for the film comes from, but it is original enough that it never feels like a ripoff.
There is some surprising gore in the film, and some of the 'freaks' makeup is good, but unfortunately no one in the cast is particularly good. They're all competent but I never really care about them the way you do for the family in Hills. Likewise, you don't get to know much about the freaks either apart from the barker and the young boy. A lot of them are just generic bearded biker type men who boss the more mutated ones around.
What the film needed was a bit more in the first section. We only get to see the family walk through a couple of rooms in the side show but they don't see any of the freaks until the two boys happen to meet each other after. It needed an inciting incident for why the family was targeted.
Still, Side Sho managed to be entertaining throughout and stands out over many other shot on digital early-2000s DTV films.