Review: The Funhouse (1981)

The Funhouse (1981)

Rated R

Score: 2 out of 5

Where classic slashers from the genre's golden age are concerned, The Funhouse stands out as a serious disappointment. It had Tobe Hooper returning to the slasher genre seven years after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it boasted a carnival setting that promised some thrills and chills, and the killers were legitimately compelling in ways you don't normally get from slasher villains, so the parts were there for a great movie. What went wrong? A lot, if I'm being honest, but the biggest problems start with the characters and the pacing, which are both terminal. Throughout the film, I was constantly annoyed by the group of four teenage friends who served as this movie's focal point, and waiting for them to finally get killed. I'll give the film points for trying to develop its main characters and present a portrait of backwoods, trailer-trash Americana on the skids in the form of the sleazy carnival they go to, but when the people you're supposed to be rooting for are either loathsome or one-dimensional in such a manner that the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people") have kicked in about twenty minutes into the film, all of that goes to waste. Both of the guys are sleazy horndogs, the "hot" girl of the group is a vapid airhead, and the heroine is one of the flattest, most boring, and most useless final girls I've ever seen in a horror movie, somebody who survives almost by pure luck with how many stupid mistakes she makes during the last act as she tries to fight the killer.

Having such a terrible cast made it that much more insufferable how the film stretched the obligatory twenty minutes of first-act character development into roughly half the movie. Until the main characters enter the titular funhouse, there are barely any horror elements in this film barring a fake-out opening parodying Psycho, and the first kill happens around the 45-minute mark. This meant that half the movie was spent watching these jackasses run around a carnival acting like jackasses and doing nothing to endear themselves to me, all while I was constantly checking the runtime wondering when they were finally gonna get hacked to pieces. What's more, there's an entire subplot involving the heroine's little brother that contributes absolutely nothing, feeling like it was there solely to pad the runtime without any payoff. The kid is briefly in danger at one point, but any tension fizzles out soon after as that is quickly resolved. The intent of the subplot felt like it was to give the protagonists hope for a rescue only to snatch it away, but again, I cared nothing about their fate, and consequently wound up more interested in the kid's own peril instead, a subplot that ultimately didn't go anywhere. In a film with better-written protagonists, spending that much time developing them so we come to care more about their deaths would've been a laudable creative decision. Here, however, it meant that the film simply dragged.

The worst part is, there were moments when a much better film was peeking through here, moments that were themselves connected to its characters -- specifically, the killers. The clown with the axe on the poster never shows up in the film, but fortunately, we do get a pair of very interesting villains, a father-and-son duo who run the titular carnival dark ride. The son is a malformed, mentally disabled freak whose father employs him as a worker on the ride while wearing a mask to cover up his hideous face, and who has a habit of killing locals in the towns the carnival travels through, with the father covering up the murders and growing increasingly frustrated having to raise him. These two could've made for the villain-protagonists of a much better movie, one about the two of them traveling with the carnival and working with all the other colorful characters who are part of it (who are all far more interesting than our actual main characters from what we see of them), all while a trail of corpses follows them with each new town they visit. Rick Baker's effects work made for a very scary-looking monster, while Kevin Conway was by far the best actor in the movie as the killer's undeniably evil yet multilayered father.

The Bottom Line

Rob Zombie should remake this movie. No, seriously. His sensibilities line up perfectly with the mood this film was trying to go for, and he'd likely avoid a lot of its worst pitfalls. As it stands, though, Hell Fest is a better version of this movie, which just has too many problems with its boring characters and sluggish pacing for me to recommend it to anyone other than the most diehard '80s slasher aficionados.