Halloween Edition: The Funhouse (1981) Movie Review

The Funhouse (1981)

**SPOILER ALERT! This review contains the movie ending**

The premise of the movie is simple. Against her father's wishes Amy, her boyfriend Buzz and their two friends decide to dare each other to spend a night in the funhouse of a sleazy traveling carnival which was previously blamed for the disappearance of two teen girls.

The reason I picked this movie was because of the cover. I've never been scared of clowns and the one on the cover looked pretty creepy. Unfortunately, this movie wasn't about clowns. In fact, there was only one clown in the whole movie and he was animatronic.

It did have a few good features with the spooky carnival atmosphere, the funhouse sets and all of the animatronics, puppets and creepy carnival characters. This is something that I love about the older generation of horror movies. Nothing is CGI. Everything that you see on screen you could touch with your hands. Everything is real. I think some people underestimate the power of really good puppetry when they look at their budget and decided digital and fake is the way to go. I also really enjoyed the little brothers room which featured movie posters and masks from classic Universal Studios monster movies. Throughout the movie, I couldn't get over the fact that Buzz looked like John Ritter in his Three's Company days. Even the clothes that the actor was wearing I'm sure John Ritter wore on the show. Uncanny resemblance.

In the case of this movie, the bad outweighed the good. Although it had a good concept with the movie taking place in a carnival funhouse, it didn't deliver the goods. It was a very slow movie and nothing interesting happened until around the 1 hour and 10 minute mark. If they would have cut all the boring scenes or the ones that dragged on so long, the movie would have totaled 30 minutes. I'm also not sure why we saw so many scenes with the younger brother spying on his sister and her friends. They could have shown a shorter scene or two with him sneaking out and wandering around the carnival but half the movie is just him wandering around aimlessly.

Three iconic horror movies came to mind while watching this film. The movie intro was very Halloween meets Psycho with the younger brother putting on a clown mask, grabbing a knife and attacking his sister in the shower. The characters working at the carnival are creepy, dysfunctional and remind me so much of the family on Texas Chainsaw. Of course nothing is more similar to Texas Chainsaw than the character who wears the Frankenstein mask to cover up his head. Originally, I thought that he was just a person who was deformed but even after he was unmasked, I wasn't really sure what he was. The camera never held still long enough for me to get a good look at him. From what I can tell, he is a two faced goat with rabies. Not the scariest thing I've seen in the movies. I spent so much time trying to figure out just what he was that it took away from the movie itself. The ending also felt very Halloween with the two faced goat electrocuting himself.

In the end, the movie was too long and not a whole lot happened. It was a good concept but was executed horribly. This movie may have been called Funhouse but when I watched it, there was no fun in my house.

Grade: D+

Check back tomorrow for a horror movie review from a 1959 title!