Nightmare Fuel 2018: Day 6 – The Funhouse

For the sixth day of this here Nightmare Fuel, I finally got around to watching an earlier effort from the late, great Tobe Hooper.  Though not generally considered one of his finest outings, especially compared to films like Lifeforce and Poltergeist, The Funhouse still holds plenty of panache among horror fans.

What we have on our hands here is almost your typical early-80s style of slasher flick:  A group of young people (we’re talking very late teens here) head off on a double date to a traveling carnival.  They see the sights, ride the rides, get a little frisky at times, the uzh.  At one point in the evening, they decide it’s a good idea to shack up for the night in the spookhouse.  Naturally, why wouldn’t they?  While there, they witness a deformed carny (who’s been otherwise wandering about dressed like Frankenstein’s monster, mask and all) murder the carnival’s resident fortune teller (this comes almost as a result of her saying “It happens to everyone”, so extrapolate to your heart’s content) and his father work to cover it up.  The teens are discovered, though, and proceed to be hunted down by these ne’er-do-wells.  You can probably imagine the rest.

Now, I said this was almost a typical slasher, and I stand by that.  The opening simultaneously homages Halloween and Psycho with a first-person POV bit that results in a shower stabbing.  Wholly two thirds of the film are taken up by character development, giving us quite the glimpse into the minds and motivations of our primary quartet – as well as of our pair of antagonists.  Indeed, I was getting worried that the mayhem would never begin when I spotted the runtime cross the hour mark, but things never got truly boring (a touch dull, though, I’ll admit), and all of this setup work allowed for the characters’ actions and reactions during the climax made a whole lot o’ sense.  Plus the movie just plain looks better than most slashers of the time, and the score seems just a tad bit fuller, lusher, more nuanced, as well (though whether or not it actually is eludes me at the moment). This is a slasher with pretensions of being a full movie.

Hooper’s skill at the helm is evident here, keeping the pace leisurely moving along and helping the cast deliver some quality performances.  Of note for me are lead girl Elizabeth Berridge (best known to me as Mozart’s long-suffering wife in Amadeus), who brought some quiet dignity and aplomb to the group of rowdy teens;  Kevin Conway (who I will always prefer to remember as SAC head Curtis LeMay in Thirteen Days), who pulls extra duty as a trio of barkers – one of which is inexplicably British, and all three carry a healthy layer of carny sleaze – as well as the deformed man’s father, ostensibly one of said barkers; and former mime Wayne Doba, whose amazing physicality helped him play the deformed man very effectively, even through the thick, stiff, and clearly unwieldy makeup.  DP Andrew Laszlo was brought on because Hooper liked his work with shadows on The Warriors. and that skill is on display here, deftly making everything in the carnival – and especially in the spookhouse – seem both approachable and off-putting, depending on when and how you looked at it.  And, as stated before, John Beal’s score is more than up to the task of accompanying the various on-screen shenanigans.

While it is stronger than most slashers, I did find the middle a bit flabby and dull, and I just couldn’t fully get invested in our protagonists, aside from Berridge.  (They’re not really annoying or anything, just people I couldn’t get behind for some reason.)  Still, it’s a strong effort worthy of Hooper’s name.