Look, I'm a horror fan. I normally roll my eyes at pearl-clutchers who fixate on the genre's lack of moral value or whatever. But watching The Funhouse gives me some sympathy for those people. This must be what all horror movies look like to them.
The Funhouse is grimy and disgusting and just makes you feel unclean. The entire film looks like it was shot through a special lens filter made of crystalized vomit. From the opening scene, in which a pervy kid pranks his sister with a rubber knife while she's soaping up in the shower, the entire universe of this movie only seems to exist to make you feel queasy. Was that Tobe Hooper's intention? If so, what was the point? I think Texas Chain Saw Massacre is kind of a miracle of a film in its uncompromising ode to depravity, eccentricity, and bad taste, but The Funhouse is like the mirror version of that, where everything that went right in Chain Saw goes wrong here. The characters are unappealing, the writing is dull, the setting is ugly and the pacing is baffling. Even the villains can't manage to be entertaining. Things just barely start to pick up in the finale, but even that goes on forever. You just want to shout at the main character, "MOVE!"
Artless grotesquerie, sculpted in wax.
The Funhouse is grimy and disgusting and just makes you feel unclean. The entire film looks like it was shot through a special lens filter made of crystalized vomit. From the opening scene, in which a pervy kid pranks his sister with a rubber knife while she's soaping up in the shower, the entire universe of this movie only seems to exist to make you feel queasy. Was that Tobe Hooper's intention? If so, what was the point? I think Texas Chain Saw Massacre is kind of a miracle of a film in its uncompromising ode to depravity, eccentricity, and bad taste, but The Funhouse is like the mirror version of that, where everything that went right in Chain Saw goes wrong here. The characters are unappealing, the writing is dull, the setting is ugly and the pacing is baffling. Even the villains can't manage to be entertaining. Things just barely start to pick up in the finale, but even that goes on forever. You just want to shout at the main character, "MOVE!"
Artless grotesquerie, sculpted in wax.
