Lance Kerwin, God rest his soul, was the master of losing his virginity on prime-time TV: first on a controversial episode of the celebrated James at 15 series, then again in the rightly uncelebrated telepic Side Show. (Did he ball a vampire in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot? My memory’s not what it used to be.)

With an open mouth forever stuck on flabbergasted mode, Kerwin plays Nick, a 16-year-old runaway and puppeteer with a killer Jimmy Durante impression right down to the last “ha-cha-cha-cha.” Back when those were marketable skills, that’s enough to earn him a spot in the traveling circus. In the freak show tent of the traveling circus, that is, but a job’s a job — and then some, with the fringe benefit of seduction by the luscious, post-Scorchy (and grown adult) Connie Stevens!

Directed by actor William Conrad after his long run on Cannon, Side Show offers little for viewers to grasp between the murder occurring in the final stretch and Nick’s intro (via Red Buttons, When Time Ran Out …) to his co-workers: the tall lady, the fat lady, the snake lady, the tattooed lady, the sword swallower, the man with no face and a little-people couple with the last name Tiny. With respect to the latter, the movie’s big conflict is whether Nick can finagle a reunion with their normal-sized son so the Tinys can meet their granddaughter. Can your nerves stand it?

Pay no attention to the entirely misleading VHS box art that sells this particularly low-wattage melodramatic number as some kind of slasher. Its horrors are, at best, the clowns, trained chimps and Stevens’ soon-abandoned Hungarian accent. Still, in concept, Side Show gives producers Sid and Marty Krofft their version of Freaks. Just don’t expect the brothers to employ their usual brand of Saturday-psychedelia disturbia, ladies and gentlemen — neither the encephalitic H.R. Pufnstuf nor the monstrosities of D.C. Follies. —Rod Lott