Especially when the very first thing you get (post-credits) is a shower scene with nudity from an actress that looks about 15. She was actually 18 or 19 at the time, but still. It's disconcerting, and not in a good way. Anyways, her little shit brother scares her - he grabs a bunch of horror paraphernalia from his room and pranks her by pretending to stab her while she's showering. First, gross. Second, it's set up like this kid will have *something* to do with the story. And while he hangs out at the periphery of the plot, he's literally a nothing character. It's hard to say why he's even in the film, other than to just pad the runtime. Maybe he had something better to do (like get killed?) in a different version of the script, but as it is he's just a waste of space.
My Synopsis: Group of four teenage-ish friends smoke some reefer, go to a skeezy traveling carnival, and decide to sneakily spend the night in the funhouse. While they are hiding they witness a crime (and witness a monster, I guess) and are in for the fight of their lives.
Elaborate Genre: Monster Slasher
Overall: Not too good. The pieces for something cool are there (nifty setting, good atmosphere, willingness to go big), but the whole thing feels flat.
Funhouse takes a while to get going. It spends a long time with our friends, just hanging out at the carnival - playing games, smoking dope, peeping in the girlie tent - and honestly, it's kind of gross. The carnival, that is. Our friends are just kind of boring. They also go into a freakshow/animal tent, and we are treated to a deformed cow missing part of it's mouth, as well as a cow with two heads. Why it's all cows, I don't know. Better traveling town to town than being slaughtered, I guess. (Although would they sell deformed cow meat?) But I would skip that exhibit in real life, and don't need it in my slasher/monster movie either.
Normally, I'd give a movie credit for taking some time to develop the characters, but here? They just aren't that compelling. Here's what I know about them: they like pot, one guy works at a gas station, and our Final Girl is more virginal (i.e. more Final Girl-ish) than the others. I didn't really pick up on any other details. So even though this is theoretically character building time, it feels wasted. The four of them aren't interesting, but they aren't so obnoxious that you want to see them die either. It's a gray zone where there's really no satisfactory way out.
The kills/gore aren't really anything special. Most of it happens off screen, and what you do see is pretty weak. I'm thinking either (a) Hooper wasn't super interested in the gore stuff, or (b) we were just too early into the slasher craze for gore to be a focal point. There's a spark missing from the action/chase scenes too. For instance, there's an attack scene in a tunnel that should be intense - there's a cool lighting effect (strobing thanks to a big vent fan) and the bad guy is slowly stalking a prone victim. This exact setup has worked so many times in so many movies, but here it just falls flat. The camera just isn't doing anything exciting, it's poorly cut, and it feels sort of listless.
I guess one (kind of spoilery) thing I did kind of like was that Funhouse is kind of sneakily a monster movie. I expected a plain ol' slasher, but the big bad here is pretty much a monster. Technically, he's a deformed guy who works at the funhouse for his (abusive?) carnie father, but for all intents and purposes he's just monster who happens to wear a jumpsuit. The monster makeup didn't really do it for me. About the best thing I can say is that it goes big - it's a bold design, to say the least. But it just looks too large and awkward and the noises he makes don't really match his look.
So yeah, Funhouse is pretty skippable. It's never offensively bad, but it's just kind of there.
I would not recommend this film.
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