Entry Sixteen: The Funhouse (1981)

The Funhouse (1981)

Dir: Tobe Hooper

"Pay to get in, pray to get out."

Hey folks, I'm taking a break from holiday movies with this entry, but I promise I'll get to one more yuletide gem before the year is out.  In between his indie smash The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre and hitting the absolute mainstream and ruining his career with a massive coke habit, Tobe Hooper directed The Funhouse, his first major studio release.

Four teenagers; Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus), Buzz (Cooper Huckabee, Django Unchained), Liz (Largo Woodruff, Bill On His Own) and Richie (Miles Chapin, Howard the Duck), decide to spend the night in the funhouse of a traveling carnival.  While getting ready to engage in some serious deep-dicking, the quartet are interrupted by a noise and witness Zelda the fortune-teller (who they pissed off earlier) accepting money for a handjob by a drooling freak in a Frankenstein's monster mask.  Zelda's too effective at her job, however, and this masked maniac throttles her to death when her magic mitts cause him to cum too quickly.  This man-beast is the mutated son of the carnival's barker (Kevin Conway, Jennifer Eight, TV's Oz), who discovers our trespassing teens spying on the murder when Richie fumbles his lighter.  At his father's request, the albino mutant begins to slaughter the teens in various ways (Richie gets hanged AND gets an axe through the head, the comely Liz gets disemboweled while trying to seduce the freak).  Buzz kills the barker with a sword, but ends up impaled upon the same blade.  In the end, Liz is forced to do battle with the mutant amidst the industrial machinery operating the funhouse behind the scenes.

The Funhouse is very much a transitional film for Hooper; it features the unusual camerawork of his indie days, but is set to a bombastic orchestral score (by John Beal, who had worked with Olivia Newton-John and The Captain and Tennille!); it's shot on low-grade film stock, yet features recognizable actors.  On the plus side, Hooper manages to recapture much of the grime and grit of Texas Chainsaw; on the negative side, his teenage heroes are pretty vapid and beg nothing but indifference.  Having attended a county fair late-night in rural southern Florida, I can tell you that Hooper damn well nails the atmosphere here.  Keep your eyes peeled for William Findlay (The Phantom of the Paradise) in a brief role as the magician.  I like Hooper a lot, and I'll recommend this one.  He made some great flicks (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Poltergeist, Lifeforce), and I really wish he hadn't just given up (see anything he's made in the past 20 years).