Hellzapoppin’ is a 1940s black and white flick with lots of singing, dancing and comedy. You’ll find some singing, dancing and comedy at the Hellzapoppin Circus Sideshow Revue (which owes its name to the old film), but there is also plenty that never would have made it to the celluloid — like Zamora the Torture King; Lady Diabla, a sword swallower; and Penguin Boy.

Bryce “The Govna” Graves

Leader Bryce “The Govna” Graves ferries his band of macabre and mind-bending performers around the country in an old 1994 prison bus.

“It still looks like a prison bus on the outside, but it’s all top-of-the-line inside,” Graves says.

Graves and his crew hope to imprison patrons of the White Mule in a weird world of sideshow delights at their performance this Sunday, which starts at 8 p.m.

“I’ve always been interested in eccentric projects, whether it’s bands or artists,” Graves says.

The former rock band manager from Garland, Texas, worked for six years with the Bros Grim Side Show, a modern-day oddities show with a turn-of-the-century feel, before branching out on his own a little more than a year ago. Since then, Hellzapoppin has toured across the globe.

“Now we’re performing to hard rock and rock ‘n’ roll music,” he says. “There is lots of fire and pyrotechnics. We updated our costumes but used the same performances and performers. We just changed the whole look and feel.”

And that feel is not for the squeamish. Many of the Hellzapoppin performers have been seen on stages at large rock festivals like OzzFest and The Family Values Tour with Korn.
Zamora the Torture King has all manner of grotesque yet fascinating tricks in his repertoire, but he is best known for pushing sharp skewers through various muscles such as the bicep. His control of mind over matter reportedly allows him to be pressed into a bed of nails under 1,000 pounds of weight; eat a broken light bulb; and swallow a long string and then surgically remove it with a small incision below his ribcage.

Reporters for the show 20/20 interviewed Zamora recently for a segment on pain tolerance scheduled to air in May.

Also on the bill are Lady Diabla, one of the few female sword swallowers in the world, and John Shaw, whose act is described as “an exhibition into some of history’s most dazzling and bizarre human feats.”

Graves has a cast of steady performers who travel around in the hell bus, but to fill out the bill he will often ask acts to join for a few shows or just a few months.