The Funhouse - Will's Review

A fairly mainstream entry this week, distributed by Universal, and with creature makeup design by Rick Baker, this is NOT the kind of movie you expect to see sandwiched between  Cannibal Holocaust and Faces of Death. It has an innocuous enough title, and even the box art isn't particularly menacing (the wonderful deformed mouth of the theatrical poster is replaced with a jack-in-the-box that I don't think even appears in the movie).

If fact, the only thing that could possibly have red-flagged this movie to the puritans is the director - this is Tobe Hooper's 2nd entry on the list (after Week 18's Death Trap), but even that doesn't make sense as his most famous (and nastiest) work The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is conspicuous by its  inexplicable absence from the DPP list.

Still, here it is; so enough about why...

SPOILERS FOLLOW


Looking the film up online, you'll find it tends to get listed as a slasher, although I'm not sure there's enough actual slashing for it to qualify; that said the atmosphere is pure 80's slasher movie, so I'm willing to class it as one on those grounds.

Plot wise, 4 teens go to the carnival and decide, for reasons best known to themselves, that the funhouse (ghost train) would be a good place to spend the night, so they buy a ticket and bail out of the cars to get themselves locked in.

While inside, they peer down into the basement (how a traveling carnival has a basement to its rides I don't know) and see one of the ride operators pay the fortune seller for sex - except he finishes early (way early) and loses his temper (with fatal consequences) when she won't refund him.

Said ride operator, by the way, communicates in grunts and wears a pretty cool Frankenstein mask, which he refuses to take off even for his paid-for rumpy-pumpy. Predictably enough, when the mask finally does come off (while his father, the barker, is beating him for killing 'one of their own') he is hideously deformed.

I have a problem with this; if you are a carnival barker, and your son is a 2 nosed, gnarl toothed albino, why on earth would you cover that with a Frankenstein mask? He could preform his job just as well as-is, and have people assume it's a mask or (even better) teach him how to eat lightbubs or bite the heads off of chickens and stick him in the freakshow! It seems like to great of an opportunity to miss!

But no, his father dresses him up as a different freak and sets him to work loading people into funhouse cars... Whatever...

Anyway, the father realises that our teens have witnessed the murder, and so sets his son to work getting rid of the witnesses.

The monster makeup is, I have to say, disappointing; his 'real' face looks more like a mask than the mask he covers it with! I expect better from Baker, and can only assume that the budget didn't allow for much time or great materials.

The funhouse itself offers a nice claustrophobic setting, although it gets a bit limited after a while, and it might have been nice to see the action spill out into the carnival grounds.

All in all not a bad little movie if you like low-rent 80s slashers, not the best film we've seen so far, but far FAR from the worst!

Body count: 6
Boob Count: 1 pair (plus 3 more with nipples, but only nipples, covered)
Animal Body Count: 0
Most Memorable Death: Electrocution on screen, seizure in your living room!  

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