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Review (Contains Spoilers)

It is perhaps fair to say that Tobe Hooper spent some time living off the phenomenal success of his low budget horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Despite the lukewarm critical and popular reception granted to his excellent but sadly much underrated second feature Death Trap (aka – Eaten Alive (1976), Hooper soon rallied and bounced back in style with his deservedly acclaimed made for television adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979). With the unexpected, runaway box office success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978 and Sean Cunningham’s Friday The 13th (1980) ushering in the age of the American teen slasher film and suddenly turning the horror genre extremely profitable at the start of the eighties, Hooper soon found himself in demand.

In late 1980 Hooper embarked on his first work for a major studio as Universal hired him to direct The Funhouse from a script written by Lawrence Block. As with most of Hooper’s studio funded productions of the eighties The Funhouse soon encountered both production problems and studio interference mainly stemming from the decision to utilise a genuine travelling carnival in production. A genuine period carnival featuring rides and attractions dating back to the 1940’s was located in Akron, Ohio where it was dismantled and shipped out to the films shooting location in Miami, Florida where the carnival was then reassembled. However this ambitious step bought with it numerous difficulties largely pertaining to union regulations on working hours. Once Universal got wind of these problems studio executives became concerned and dispatched a completion guarantor to the set in a bid to “protect their investment”. Due to this overzealous meddling and a limited shooting schedule Hooper reportedly found his position as director in jeopardy and was forced to compromise and omit much of the exposition from Block’s original screenplay in order to deliver a finished cut of the film on schedule.

Although it would eventually become something of a cult favourite amongst horror fans The Funhouse would prove a mild disappointment at the box office despite turning a modest profit and attracting a largely appreciative reaction from critics who mostly acclaimed The Funhouse for being a cut above most of the teen orientated stalk and slash fair flooding the worlds screens at the time. The Funhouse would also attract a degree of controversy here in the UK when it became one of a number of innocuous and comparatively mainstream horror films caught up in the Video Nasty witch-hunt of the early eighties and was briefly outlawed on tape only to be quickly dropped from the Nasties hit list and re-released uncut just a few years later. One popular theory is that The Funhouse was singled out due to confusion with Roger Watkins’ infamous exploitation effort The Last House On Dead End Street which also went by the alternate title of The Funhouse on video. However, this seems to be nothing more than a myth erroneously perpetuated by various horror genre historians over the years.

Following The Funhouse Tobe Hooper would move on to directing the horror smash hit Poltergeist (1982) as a favour to his friend Steven Spielberg. However, despite the phenomenal success of Poltergeist, Hooper’s professional integrity would be called into question when allegations came to light that Spielberg – who wrote, co-produced, partially storyboarded and certainly made many of the creative decisions – had actually directed the film himself. In a perverse way the success of Poltergeist in the long run did Hooper’s filmmaking career more harm than good. Unfortunately this would prove to be the story of the rest of Hooper’s career as he spent the remainder of the eighties moving from one problematic and often ultimately failed production to another with the occasional diamond such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986) amidst the rough. By the early nineties Hooper’s career had declined sharply as he eventually became the director behind sorry junk such as Spontaneous Combustion (1990), lame Steven King adaptation The Mangler (1995) and the woeful straight to video abomination Crocodile (2000).

The plot of The Funhouse begins with attractive teenager Amy (Berridge) being menaced in the shower by her prank playing younger brother Joey (Carson). In her rage Amy swears to get even with Joey. That weekend Amy is set to go out on a late night double date with her admirer Buzz (Huckabee), her promiscuous friend Liz (Woodruff) and Liz’s boyfriend Richie (Chapin). Their destination is a travelling carnival despite the warnings of Amy’s father who had forbade her to visit the carnival due to rumours of young girls having been discovered murdered when the same carnival passed through a neighbouring county the previous year. The quartet have a wonderful marijuana fuelled time at the carnival enjoying all of the various rides and attractions despite Amy being unnerved at the way the various carnival barkers seem to constantly hone in on her. When Richie foolhardily suggests that they sneak inside the carnival funhouse and spend the night there they all happily go along with him.

However, the two couples illicit evening of fun, frolics and sex inside the funhouse takes a darker turn when they witness a masked carnival worker (Doba) brutally murder the resident fortune teller Madame Zena (Miles) after she takes money from him in return for sexual favours only to then renege on their grubby bargain. The masked individual it turns out is the retarded son of the funhouse barker (Conway) who when confronted by his father over the murder and the missing contents of the cash box (which Richie has foolishly stolen) flies into a rage and tears off his mask revealing himself to be a horrifically deformed monster. When Amy and her friends accidentally give away their presence they are plunged into a terrifying battle for survival as the barker sends his hideous son into the funhouse to eliminate the witnesses to Zena’s murder. Trapped inside the funhouse with no means of escape the hapless teens are soon picked off one by one by the prowling monster.

The Funhouse is something of a fusion of subgenres, essentially registering as yet another addition to the many teens in peril stalk and slash films made during the early eighties whilst as a casual aside also paying affectionate homage to the classic Universal horror pictures of the thirties. Posters for many of the classic Universal horror’s adorn the walls during the opening scene in which a masked, rubber knife wielding Joey prowls around the family home before scaring the life out of his showering sister in an obvious dual nod to both Psycho and Halloween. In addition Amy and Joey’s parents are shown idly watching a late night airing of Bride Of Frankenstein on television and the funhouse barker’s murderous, deformed son hides his horrendous visage behind a mask clearly modeled upon the iconic image of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. However, The Funhouse otherwise clearly makes the majority of its concessions towards the then in vogue teenage slasher cycle. Fortunately, whereas many eighties horror films of the same ilk have a tendency to feel depressingly generic, The Funhouse stands out rather gloriously from the crowd as Hooper brings his own unique blend of atmosphere and visual magic to the table.

While the decision to utilise an authentic period carnival in production bought with it many well documented problems it is nonetheless one that benefits the film greatly as Hooper uses the wonderful atmosphere of the carnival itself to memorable effect. The films first half builds slowly but pleasurably as Hooper uses the inherently sinister aura and sleazy, neon bathed exoticism of the rides and attractions to create an unnerving yet playful sense of unease. The viewer is given plenty of time to soak in the sights and sounds of the carnival as we accompany Amy and her friends inside the freak show (complete with the genuinely shocking sight of a two-headed cow and a mutated human foetus in a jar of formaldehyde), the tent of phoney, alcoholic fortune teller Madame Zena (played with great relish by Sylvia Miles) and a seedy burlesque show. In addition horror genre regular William Finley – perhaps best known for his starring role in Brian De Palma’s cult favourite The Phantom Of The Paradise (1974) – contributes a brief but highly memorable cameo appearance as Marco the Magnificent, the magician of the carnivals decidedly macabre magic show. In a creepy additional touch the carnivals various barkers (all of whom are played by Kevin Conway) all seem to intentionally focus in their attention on Amy and she seems somehow transfixed by them.

At roughly the halfway point when Wayne Doba’s monster begins terrorising the hapless teenage quartet inside the carnival funhouse itself The Funhouse picks up its pace and begins to follow the more familiar pattern. Fortunately Hooper handles the potentially formulaic stalking and killing of his youthful protagonists with great flair and while the shocks and frights are all rather mechanical they are at least perfectly timed and succeed in making the viewer jump out of their seat. Additionally Hooper wisely waits until this point to play the films trump card in the shape of the carnival funhouse itself. With its garish lighting, loud colours and sinister array of mannequins (which also feature in the atmospheric opening credits) the funhouse is undeniably creepy place and pretty much the last place anyone with their head screwed on would want to spend the night.

Some horror fans and genre historians over the years have criticised The Funhouse for lacking the same claustrophobic intensity Hooper fashioned so memorably with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but for me personally this criticism simply does not ring true as once the horrors are confined within the walls of the funhouse itself Hooper does a commendable job of milking tension from his teenage protagonists seemingly inescapable predicament. He is aided immeasurably in his efforts by Andrew Laszlo’s visually stylish widescreen cinematography which makes the funhouse interiors seethe with malevolence and John Beal’s effective score which blends his own suitably evocative compositions with the genuine sounds of the carnival itself.

As usual a special mention must also be made for the efforts of special make-up effects legend Rick Baker who delivers one of his most underrated achievements in the form of Wayne Doba’s monster. With his cleft head, bulging eyes, wild hair and mouthful of misaligned fangs Baker’s creature is a truly hideous creation, but ultimately a somewhat sympathetic one. Clearly mentally retarded in addition to his deformity the unfortunate barker’s son clearly sets about stalking and killing more out of a misplaced sense of loyalty towards his father rather than out of any genuine wickedness. Nonetheless Hooper puts Baker’s monster to unnerving use, tightening up the screws of tension as the beast stalks its way through the funhouse in search of Amy and company. Liz’s fatal encounter with the slavering fiend in one of the funhouses ventilation shafts is especially skin-crawling. Yet despite its brief tour of duty as a Video Nasty The Funhouse is actually fairly restrained in terms of onscreen gore. With the exception of one unfortunate protagonist getting an axe embedded in the back of his skull and a brief but vicious impaling, most of the bloodletting is implied rather than explicitly shown with Hooper – just as he did previously with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – allowing the viewers mind to fill in the inevitably grisly blanks.

Unfortunately despite Hooper’s superb handling of atmosphere and tension, The Funhouse is hampered to a degree by rather thin and substandard characterisation. With the exception of the gorgeous Elizabeth Berridge as Amy the teenage central protagonists are rather obnoxious and dislikeable making it hard for the viewer to really care about their fate. Far more memorable are the caricaturised yet highly effective array of Southern grotesques which populate the carnival. It is Sylvia Miles’ lisping turn as the pseudo Eastern European white trash fortune teller Madame Zena, William Finley’s excellent cameo and in particular Kevin Conway as the villainously sleazy barker that really capture the attention. Hooper returns the same twisted depiction of the ties that bind that he visited with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre via the bond of familial loyalty that exists between the barker and his homicidal, deformed son. Unfortunately Conway’s barker is sadly etched out in insufficient detail to do Hooper’s typically skewed depiction of their father/son relationship justice, although in fairness it seems the blame for this lies not with Hooper or writer Larry Block but with the films notoriously chaotic shooting schedule. When the production began encountering difficulties Hooper was forced to omit numerous scenes which appeared in Block’s original screenplay in order to complete the film on time. In the films credits Conway’s character is given the name Conrad Straker although this name is never alluded to in the finished film suggesting that in Block’s original screenplay the barker was etched out in further detail. Famed horror author Dean Koontz would later pen a novelisation based upon Block’s screenplay which contains details Hooper was forced to cut from the film in addition to supplementary material created by Koontz himself.

As a final point I cannot help voicing my dismay that few critics or indeed horror fans seem to have picked up on the slight yet clever manner in which The Funhouse slyly subverts the sexual politics of the slasher subgenre to which it essentially belongs. Whereas in most slasher films it is the prim, dowdily dressed virgin that survives while her promiscuous counterparts die horribly, it is well worth noting that Amy, while still a virgin, is the only of the two principal females we see in a state of undress. Not only is she shown topless in the films opening shower scene but we also later glimpse her locked in a near naked clinch with her suitor Buzz later in the film – behaviour hardly befitting of your typical slasher movie heroine. Perhaps though this is merely coincidental as The Funhouse subsequently reverts squarely to type with the demises of both Madame Zena and later Liz whose attempts to extract money and mercy respectively from the monster with the unfulfilled promise of sexual favours seals the fate of both.

While The Funhouse is certainly not without its shortcomings, all in all it ranks as an underappreciated gem of early eighties horror cinema. Not only is The Funhouse one of Tobe Hooper’s best efforts but it is also one of the more worthy and atypical additions to the groundswell of stalk and slash pictures flooding out of America at the time. Had it not been for studio pressure and production hassles forcing Hooper to compromise the finished product somewhat The Funhouse could conceivably have been a bona fide genre classic, but even as it stands this is a superior effort. While essentially a formula based studio backed horror film in terms of its concept, Hooper’s gifts the film its own unique flavour to make it stand out from the crowd. Indeed Hooper uses the sleazy and sinister aura of the carnival to superb effect, creating a subdued yet powerful air of menace in the films first half before paying it off with a second act that delivers the requisite tension, shocks and scares in abundance. While poor characterisation does mar things somewhat overall The Funhouse is a highly entertaining, wonderfully atmospheric and at times genuinely scary and unnerving little shocker which should more than satisfy horror fans in an undemanding mood.

Also Try… The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) / The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 / Death Trap / Friday The 13th / My Bloody Valentine / The Burning / Clownhouse / Something Wicked This Way Comes.

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Piczo