THE FUNHOUSE (1981)

Studio:       Universal Pictures
Director:    Tobe Hooper
Writer:       Larry Block
Producer:  Derek Power, Steven Bernhardt
Stars:     Cooper Huckabee, Miles Chapin, Largo Woodruff, Sylvia Miles, William Finley, Elizabeth Berridge, Kevin Conway, Wayne Doba, Shawn Carson

Review Score:

---

Summary:

After inadvertently witnessing a horrible event while spending the night inside a funhouse, four friends are stalked by a pair of murderous carnies.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Teenager Amy Harper angrily tells her little brother Joey that she refuses to take him to the carnival after he plays a prank by pretending to be a masked murderer stabbing her in the shower. Mr. Harper tells his daughter that he doesn’t want her going to the carnival, as it is the same one that traveled through Fairfield when two little girls were found dead in a creek. Amy lies and says that she plans on going to the movies for her first date with filling station attendant Buzz Dawson.

Buzz and Amy pick up Amy’s friend Liz and Liz’s boyfriend Richie and head to the carnival. Joey sneaks out of the house and finds his own way to the fairgrounds to spy on his sister.

Amy, Buzz, Liz, and Richie spend the evening playing midway games, riding rides, visiting an animal freak show, and watching the performance of vampire-themed magician Marko the Magnificent. Amy has her palm read by fortuneteller Madame Zena, but Zena angrily kicks the group out of her tent when they refuse to take the reading seriously.

After Buzz cuts a hole in the back of a tent for everyone to peep at a burlesque show, Richie suggests that they spend the night inside the funhouse. Joey watches from the distance as his sister and her friends board the funhouse ride, but only empty cars return through the exit doors. The carnival closes for the night.

Amy, Buzz, Liz, and Richie hear noises coming from the office underneath the funhouse. Through slats in the floor, they watch as the Frankenstein-masked ride attendant takes money from a cashbox to pay Madame Zena for sex. Zena begins using her hand on the attendant and he climaxes almost immediately. Zena moves to leave. Upset that their encounter is already over, the attendant bars Zena’s exit, leading to a physical altercation that ends with the attendant strangling Zena and electrocuting her with the fuse box.

After the attendant exits, Amy and the others go downstairs to find a way out. Buzz excuses himself to go into the office to check that Madame Zena is really dead. The group discovers that the exit is chained shut and they are locked inside. They return to the floor above as noises are again heard coming from the office.

Amy and her friends observe the masked attendant interacting with his father, the carnival barker. Upon discovering Madame Zena’s body, the barker concocts a plan to dump the body and to frame locals for the death. The barker checks the cash box and discovers all of the money missing. Buzz and the others realize that Richie stole the money when he pretended to examine Zena’s body earlier.

Furious with his son over the missing money, the barker strikes the attendant, who removes his mask in a fit of frustration and reveals a deformed monster with a split face underneath. A vial drops out of Richie’s pocket and onto the office floor below, revealing the foursome’s presence in the funhouse above. The barker and his monstrous son begin hunting the teen trespassers.

Snooping around outside the funhouse, Joey is briefly grabbed by the monster before running and screaming into the arms of the carnival manager. The manager contacts Mr. and Mrs. Harper, who come to collect Joey, now wide-eyed and unable to speak after encountering the deformed monster.

While the teens hide and think of a plan, a noose descends from the ceiling, hanging Richie and pulling his body away. When a funhouse car approaches a short time later, Buzz removes an ax from one of the displays and swings it into the head of the figure in the car, only to find out that it is Richie.

Liz disappears through a trapdoor in the floor. Amy shouts for her parents when she sees them retrieving Joey from the manager’s trailer near the funhouse, but they are unable to hear her screams over the sound of the building’s ventilation fan. The monster kills Liz in another vent shaft.

The barker confronts Buzz and Amy at gunpoint. A fight ensues between the two men and Buzz impales the barker on a prop sword. Buzz’s stomach ends up punctured by the same sword when he goes to retrieve the barker’s keys and the dying man pulls Buzz towards him.

The monster jumps into the room. Amy escapes to an adjacent room and turns when she hears gunshots behind her. A hydraulic display suddenly enters holding Buzz’s dead body.

Amy finds Liz’s mutilated body in the office. The monster breaks down the door and chases Amy into the basement. During their final confrontation, Amy is able to trap the monster in between two oversized gears, crushing his midsection. As day breaks, Amy escapes the funhouse in a state of shock.

---

Review:

It’s a simple premise.  One that would probably be too simple in this day and age.  Two teenage couples on a double date, with the boys played by men in their late twenties, dare to sneak off the ride and spend the night inside a carnival’s haunted mansion.  Hiding in the attraction, the quartet inadvertently spies an unplanned murder in the office below, and a cat-and-mouse chase ensues with the demented funhouse barker and his deranged monster of a son.

“The Funhouse” has a cheekily inauspicious opening, in which legendary horror director Tobe Hooper dares to double dip from the plagiarism well by copycatting famous shots from both “Psycho” and “Halloween” in one single scene.  Poetic then, that a movie cribbing clips from “Bride of Frankenstein” alongside its knowing homage or deliberate duplication would eventually have its own style stolen by every subsequent carnival-colored thriller from “House of 1,000 Corpses” to “Dark Ride.”

Evaluated in its era, “The Funhouse” flame no doubt fails to flicker against the stronger winds of its influences.  In contrast to the increasingly menacing slow-burn setups of Hitchcock and Carpenter’s classics, virtually nothing of consequence occurs during the first 50 minutes of a 93-minute runtime.  After a few red herring threats rear up in the form of a derelict woman and an incensed psychic, the movie’s actual big bad isn’t formally introduced until that past-the-middle tipping point.  First act foreshadowing between the Final Girl and her baby brother has zero payoff as an ultimately divergent thread.  The protagonists aren’t even truly tormented until late in the story’s slow jog from third base to home plate.

What occupies the bulk of “The Funhouse” instead?  Nearly three-quarters of an hour of fairground traipsing that includes a ride on the carousel, a visit to a middling magician, a tent filled with deformed animals, and a mallet swing on the strength tester to win a kewpie doll for leading lady Amy.  What horror fan would want to endure such a limp pace in 1981, when “proper” slasher peers of “The Funhouse” were piling up bodies, scares, and creating more merchandisable villains with iconic images?

Taken out of its time however, “The Funhouse” becomes something like the mutated misfit in its liquid canister circus tent display: a sideshow curiosity defying easy description and commanding rapt attention no matter how unusually deformed it may be.  Hooper’s leisurely carnival stroll probably played more dully when suburban entertainment like vampire-themed illusionists and two-headed cows were commonplace attractions.  Decades after the film’s original release, such inclusions are now interesting in their own right as time capsule throwbacks, even though they have no direct bearing on the primary plotline.

Seeing it for the first time at an impressionable age, “The Funhouse” instilled in me a desire to peek into dark corners of carnival tents for potentially sinister secrets, and yearn for what seemed like an outlaw era when traveling shows were fixated on a fascination with the macabre.  What wonder-filled imagination wouldn’t be captivated by fantasized mysteries of carnie lifestyles and animatronic skeletons after hours?  Would I want to spend a night in the haunted funhouse like Amy, or as a sneaking stowaway behind the scenes like her little brother Joey?  Absolutely.

Who wouldn’t?  The titular attraction is an enormously elaborate construct with as impossibly intricate of a layout as any Disneyland dark ride.  Multi-storied and labyrinthine enough to become lost in, the funhouse is even stocked with real steel props for its medieval knight setpiece, convenient for impaling murderous carnies and trespassing locals alike.  Ridiculously realized for a ride meant to be mobile, it’s an easier suspension of disbelief when Morton Rabinowitz’s production design and Andrew Laszlo’s cinematography drench each frame in atmosphere both subtly spooky and gobsmackingly gaudy.

As much as Larry Block’s script is dinged for its go-nowhere brother subplot and barely-there characterization of secondary couple Liz and Richie, flourishes of fleshier drama do develop.  Amy’s first date beau Buzz is introduced as an obnoxiously car-honking baddish boy throwing insults at Amy when she doesn’t get a joke and slitting switchblade holes in tarps to peep at sagging burlesque dancers.  But Buzz bucks against type by surprisingly turning into less of a lout once the sleepover plan goes belly up and cooler heads are needed to plan a path through the mayhem.

There is also the absurdly grotesque Rick Baker monster makeup that somehow manages to be silly and scary simultaneously.  Wayne Doba’s enthusiastic performance takes the mute monster to the next level by creating a creature concurrently villainous yet strangely sympathetic purely through physical mannerisms.

Interestingly, the movie’s most uncomfortable moments have less to do with the funhouse and more to do with outdated seventies sensibilities.  In one scene, Amy’s parents weirdly watch willingly as an overeager carnie nurses their traumatized son following a spooky encounter.  “I washed him up real good!” says the carnival manager.  It’s more of a cringe inducer than the odd amount of time the boy spends with his nude sister when he intrudes upon her shower.  Pedophiliac and incestuous undertones might not have been on the radar in 1981, but it is definitely in keeping with the movie’s newfound ability to come off as creepier in the 21st century.

There is simple charm in the straightforward story and retro horror appeal that makes “The Funhouse” the gold standard granddaddy of killer carnival thrillers.  Put it on prior to patronizing the local county fair during summer season and see if it isn’t still lurking in your mind while milling about the midway.  At the very least, it will make paying $5 for a two-minute tour through a haunted truck trailer, the way “real” carnival funhouses operate, a fleecing far easier to smirk at.

Review Score:  85

---