Released amidst similarly-themed offerings such as Salem's Lot, Poltergeist and Invaders from Mars, this earnest, but flawed effort in Spielbergian horror puts juvenile imagination at center stage. The elaborate scenery depicting a sleazy traveling carnival and its creepy, libidinous inhabitants possesses all the characteristics of a prepubescent phantasm. The attractiveness of petty scares, the inexplicable fascination for deformity, desperate voyeurism and joyous carelessness typical of youth are all framed with the oblique angles and saturated colors of sweat-soaked suburban nightmares. Unfortunately, since the two parallel tales of a blooming maiden and her monster-obsessed kid brother never successfully intertwine, the prosaic elements of teenage horror eventually overwhelm the would-be dreamlike scares befitting the child's point of view. In the end, The Funhouse is a film that's a tad too adult to constitute a satisfying throwback to the matinees of yesteryear and a tad too childish and conventional to stand as a genuinely disturbing horror experience. And despite several thematic and esthetic similarities with Hooper's earlier (and vastly superior) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the present film lacks the maddening pace, grinding soundtrack and perfunctory eye close-ups that insured its success. More to the point, it lacks the seriousness of it all, the uncompromising vision necessary to portray the grotesque quality of the disenfranchised as opposed to the normality of the (sub)urban bourgeois. The result is a mildly entertaining film that eludes strict categorization by lack of a definitive personality. Walking the line between the dated candor of classic monster films and the dictates of contemporary teenage slashers, it never manages to take on a distinctive flavor. Depending on your point of view, it will seem either like a rough version of the 1950s horror drive-in or a watered-down version of the ballsy horror from the 1970s. And despite some undeniable qualities (characterization, set design and savvy references), the film is marred by a certain indeterminacy of intentions that makes for an ultimately unsatisfying experience.
A kid's fantasy that puts kids in the back seat
Typically enough, the film begins with a teenage girl stepping into a shower while an unseen maniac is prepping up for an attack in a contiguous room. The girl (Elizabeth Berridge, who later appeared as Mozart's spouse in Amadeus) is the archetypal horror film protagonist. Her brazenly displayed breasts almost seem a burden for her minuscule frame and the soft features of her childish face greatly enhance her vulnerable, virginal look. At once sexualized but innocent, she is a seemingly perfect victim, i.e. one that will undoubtedly elude the villain's clutches. Of course, the present villain, rushing toward the showering maiden on carpeted floors, is only an idle threat. Despite the stalker shot associated with his viewpoint, he is soon revealed as the girl's kid brother, an horror film buff whose idea of a practical joke involves the reenactment of the classic shower scene from Psycho. This early tie-in between the world of horror cinema and the prepubescent psyche, for which reality is almost an extension of the imaginary, makes a strong case for the spectacular, if not purely ethereal nature of the horror genre. Moreover, it acts as a point of friction between the intangible scares contained in the child's mind (the surprise caused by the instantaneous apparition of a knife-wielding, mask-wearing maniac) and the tangible scares of the adolescent mind (the fear of sex tied with the invasion of one's privacy). Unfortunately, it is this very friction which is responsible for the schizoid nature of the film. Its occurring also acts as a condensation (and evacuation) of all the screenwriter's savvy in terms of self-referential statements, leaving us on a downward slope very early on.
The disrobing of Miss Berridge, framed in typically voyeuristic fashion, is merely subservient to the supremely intriguing subjective shot edited in parallel. In this shot, we see an individual wearing black leather gloves who scours through a kid's room full of horror paraphernalia, donning a mask over his camera/face and grabbing a knife with which he proceeds to attack the young woman. This simple shot contains obvious references to the Italian giallo (in the guise of the black leather gloves worn by the offender), Halloween (the mask-covered subjective shot taken from the film's opening sequence) and Psycho (the shower stabbing). Aside from eliciting joyous reactions from knowledgeable film buffs, this helps us situate horror as a self-referential genre deeply rooted in myths and make-beliefs. It also misleads us into imagining a killer which is simultaneously imagined by a kid whose overactive mind becomes the mirror of our own. Horror, in a sense, is fueled not by the presence of something horrific, but through the process of imagining something horrific, which is above all a kid's thing. The more-than-obvious reference to Psycho and the notorious "Did the knife penetrate?" issue is interesting in that regard. In Hitchcock's seminal film, it is the editing of the shower scene which creates the sense of a stabbing, more so than the latex prosthetics of later eras. The knife never penetrates Janet Leigh's flesh, nor is it supposed to look like it is. In typical Eisensteinian fashion, Hitchcock creates the impression of a stabbing rather than the would-be realistic depiction of a stabbing. The result necessitates a certain amount of participation from the audience, namely the involvement of their imagination in the process of acknowledging that a stabbing is indeed taking place in front of their eyes. Here, in The Funhouse's introductory scene, we aren't even asked such an effort as the knife cannot possibly pierce through Berridge's flesh. Its rubber blade actually wavers and bends instead of impaling, leaving the bowels untouched and our feverish expectations unfulfilled. What this goes to show is how far imagination goes in creating the experience inherent to horror cinema. Whether the knife penetrates or not, we have to believe that it does, like the child who imagines himself the slayer of his sister. And the further back our regression goes into the realm of childish imagination, the more liable we are to enjoy ourselves watching this film.
Non-too-subtle shades of Psycho
Unfortunately, the film quickly branches into well-known territory. We learn that Berridge's shower was in preparation for a double date at the carnival, where she is matched with a local bad boy (university football star Cooper Huckabee) out to deflower her. Thus, we are soon acquainted with a bit of cast taken straight out of American Graffiti and the rest of the story plays out like a dark coming-of-age film that pits a young maiden's fear of sex against a backdrop of degenerate depravity. After encountering a bevy of archetypal carnival folks, most of which are truly colorful and eccentric, the four youths decide to spend the night in the titular locale. During their stay, they witness the accidental murder of a foul-mouthed fortune teller by a sex-starved freak protected by the carnival owner, who acts as surrogate father. Despite shades of Frankenstein, the beast never comes across as a sympathetic character. His ordeal , no matter how awful we imagine it to be, is diluted into age-old, static representations of carnival folks. Once his monstrous face is revealed, he becomes no more than a strictly antagonistic creature from filmland and the protagonists' adventure becomes no more than a tedious search for an exit.
During the course of the film, we also follow Berridge's kid brother, whom we can only assume is following big sister to the carnival. After a nasty encounter with a redneck trucker, who draws a shotgun at him, kid finally makes it to the funhouse, where he notices that his sister and her friends have vanished. Although we are led to believe that he is investigating his sister's doings, he never comes to her rescue, watching her from afar without ever choosing to intervene in her affairs. When their parents show up at the carnival to pick up their stray son, he willfully decides not to mention his sister's whereabouts, despite his intimate knowledge thereof. His entire relevance to the story is thus jeopardized and both family unity, as well as the kid's overactive imagination, which could have been the saving grace of Berridge's friends, is relegated to nothingness. If this helps heightening the sense of tragedy within the film, it is narratively inconsistent and it tends to make the imaginary, which was solicited brilliantly in the introduction, completely obsolete. The result is a surprisingly tame and realistic horror venture, which evacuates all supernatural and guignolesque elements within the narrative and thus kill the magic inherent to the genre, and to the specific setting of the film.
Conventionally grotesque: The Funhouse
Despite the decent characterization and superior art direction which breathes life into each of the film's colorful locales, the sluggish pace eventually hampers it to the point of near-boredom. The labyrinthine sets that constitute the funhouse may be sharp-looking, but they offer very little in terms of narrative possibilities, let alone in terms of pursuits. What we get are cramped characters moving as slowly as possible in order to make the most of the limited sets. A case in point is the underwhelming confrontation scene between Berridge's character and the mutant loner, set in the machine room of the old funhouse. Crawling under huge cogwheels and creeping along dusty walls, the young woman seems to be under strict orders predicating theatrical snail walk. After what appears to be an eternity, during which the viewer spots the two congregating wheels that will undoubtedly cause the monster's demise, said monster finally appears from out of the shadows, engaging the protagonist in a sort of arthritic "fighting waltz" that culminates in the monster getting trapped in the railings. Very underwhelming stuff.
Watching this film, one is tempted to suggest that Tobe Hooper has greatly regressed as a director in the seven years between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the present film. The technical limitations he has to work with (pertaining mostly to the confined locales that act as sets for the most part of the film) are now blatant shortcomings. The pacing is erratic and the politics are weird. But most of all, the whole thing plays on terms so familiar as to often border on the level of soap operas. All of this would indeed seem to indicate some form of regression in the director's work. But the plain truth is that there are now strings attached to his projects, and those strings cannot possibly allow for another relentless, indie-style shocker such as Texas. The reasons being more organizational than mercantile, seeing how the present production follows a very strict formula meant to promote narration over expressiveness. That is why we now have teenagers walking the dotted lines of teenage drama like so many TV high schoolers. That is why the rawness of expression is no more but lost in a sea of prefabricated situations and dreary dramatic issues. The presence of an orchestral score (by John Beal) to replace the grating metal noises from Texas is another example of how the conventional dramatic format has subdued the pure act of affect-creation. What is lost in the process is freedom, or more precisely: independence, from which derives the destruction of narrative shackles and the liberation of raw, gut-churning emotions that allow truly affective horror to appear. Which is something that can be summed up quite vividly by comparing the physical and narrative entrapment of the present film's protagonists, forced to wander through endless stuffy corridors and to face the same doors over and over, and the freedom of Texas' protagonists, surrounded by endless wilderness, which allows them to run, to express themselves with all their bodies, without constraints. Because in the end, the dead-ends that the generic teens of The Funhouse face during the film are the same dead-ends that Hooper has had faced when bringing them to life.
Watching this film, one is tempted to suggest that Tobe Hooper has greatly regressed as a director in the seven years between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the present film. The technical limitations he has to work with (pertaining mostly to the confined locales that act as sets for the most part of the film) are now blatant shortcomings. The pacing is erratic and the politics are weird. But most of all, the whole thing plays on terms so familiar as to often border on the level of soap operas. All of this would indeed seem to indicate some form of regression in the director's work. But the plain truth is that there are now strings attached to his projects, and those strings cannot possibly allow for another relentless, indie-style shocker such as Texas. The reasons being more organizational than mercantile, seeing how the present production follows a very strict formula meant to promote narration over expressiveness. That is why we now have teenagers walking the dotted lines of teenage drama like so many TV high schoolers. That is why the rawness of expression is no more but lost in a sea of prefabricated situations and dreary dramatic issues. The presence of an orchestral score (by John Beal) to replace the grating metal noises from Texas is another example of how the conventional dramatic format has subdued the pure act of affect-creation. What is lost in the process is freedom, or more precisely: independence, from which derives the destruction of narrative shackles and the liberation of raw, gut-churning emotions that allow truly affective horror to appear. Which is something that can be summed up quite vividly by comparing the physical and narrative entrapment of the present film's protagonists, forced to wander through endless stuffy corridors and to face the same doors over and over, and the freedom of Texas' protagonists, surrounded by endless wilderness, which allows them to run, to express themselves with all their bodies, without constraints. Because in the end, the dead-ends that the generic teens of The Funhouse face during the film are the same dead-ends that Hooper has had faced when bringing them to life.
2.5/5: There's enough production values and genuine moments of brilliance here to elevate this entry above the banal slasher banner under which it was sold, but the obligatory comparison with Texas Chain Saw Massacre forced by the presence of many degenerate carnies only helps make its snail pace and overall lack of intensity that more obvious.
