• Directed by Tobe Hooper
• Written by Lawrence Block
• Starring
  • Elizabeth Berridge
  • Shawn Carson
  • Cooper Huckabee
  • Largo Woodruff

I hate to characterize Tobe Hooper as a bad director; he’s not on the level of, say, Albert Pyun or Greydon Clark. But his output is wildly uneven, ranging from genre defining (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to adequate (Salem’s Lot) to just plain putrid (Eaten Alive). (I haven’t mentioned Poltergeist because of the widespread rumors that Spielberg should have been credited as co-director.) I think that Hooper just doesn’t know what makes his movies successful; he doesn’t know how to leave out the parts that don’t work.

Here we have a movie which could have been a classic if the first third were as good as the last two thirds.

Problem #1: We open with a girl getting in the shower, intercut with POV shots of someone wandering around a room stuffed with monster memorabilia, then putting on a mask (cutting our vision down to two eye holes) and finding a knife. He then attacks the girl in the shower. Sound familiar? That’s right, in the first five minutes Hooper manages to blatantly “homage” both Psycho and Halloween. Note to filmmakers: Don’t go out of your way to remind viewers of other movies which are obviously better than your own.

The girl is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, best known as Mrs. Mozart from Amadeus), the “killer” is her kid brother Joey (Shawn Carson, who made exactly two more movies in his career, one of them being Something Wicked This Way Comes — can you be carnival-typecast?), the knife is rubber, and the breasts are okay but nothing spectacular. They’re also the only ones you’re going to see.

After chewing the little crud up, Amy goes out on her date, telling her parents she’s going to a movie when she’s really going to the carnival; her parents are against that because, you know, there was trouble at a carnival in this other town last year. (The parents are watching Bride of Frankenstein on TV. That’s three better movies referenced in under ten minutes.)

Amy’s date is Buzz, and they’re double-dating with Liz and Richie, and this being 1981 the first thing they do is light a joint. As is the case in just about every movie ever made, pot makes these people incredibly annoying; it’s better persuasive propoganda than anything the Partnership for a Drug-Free America could ever put out.

The next twenty or more minutes are filler. The foursome wanders around the carnival, going on rides, getting accosted by a bag lady who screams “God is watching you!”, seeing the animal freak show plus a deformed baby in a bottle, watching a magician with a vampire schtick, peeping in on a peepshow, and getting Amy’s fortune read a a fake gypsy’s stall.

Meanwhile, little Joey has more mischief on his mind, so he climbs down the trellis (this must have been in his audition reel for Something Wicked This Way Comes) and walks to the carnival. Hooper gets about ten thousand demerits for the two cheap scares he gives us on Joey’s trek: In the first one, Joey comes around a dark corner, looking behind him. He turns around — and a dog barks at him through a chain link fence! Boo! In the second one, a truck pulls up beside Joey and asks what he’s doing out alone. Joey doesn’t answer; the driver asks if he wants a lift, then aims a rifle at him. Joey goes running. Bwah ha ha hah! Both of these demonstrate that Hooper knew he was taking too long to get to the story; both are attempts to keep the viewers interested as he goes through the overlong setup at the carnival, instead of doing what would have fixed the movie: cutting the deadwood.

Finally, the foursome approaches the Funhouse. Richie has a great (pot-assisted) idea: Why don’t they hide and stay overnight? He convinces the others, and they get on the Funhouse ride. Here’s where Hooper finally starts to give the audience quality: his shots of the unsettling primitive animatronics laughing and jiggling add volumes to the spookiness of the remainder.

Naturally, little Joey watched them go in, so he keeps watching when their empty cars come out the other end. The carnival shuts down around him; he hides, waiting for them.

Finally, all the people are gone, and the foursome decides to, you know, get cozy. Then (great moment in film history), they hear a noise — and not just the girls! Guys hear it too! And the dialog goes like this — “Did you hear that?” “Yes, I did!” And all four go to investigate! This proves once and for all, contrary to every other horror film ever made, that a guy’s ears (and sense of self-preservation) do NOT shut off as soon as he gets aroused.

They discover they can see through the floor slats into a bedroom beneath, where a carnie in a Frankenstein’s monster mask (whom we’ve noticed helping out on rides before) pays to get some from the gypsy. There’s obviously something wrong with Frankie; he communicates in grunts and mews, and he declines to take off his mask. He also, um, “jumps the gun.” When the gypsy refuses to give his hundred dollars back, he strangles her, then leaves.

The teens are shocked and try to find a way out, but it’s hard to find their way around with the lights off. They eventually discover the door to the bedroom, and the exit. Richie visits the bedroom briefly to “see if she’s really dead,” then they try the door, which happens to be locked. (No one thinks of using the other exit from the bedroom.)

Wandering back, they find themselves above the bedroom again when Frankie enters with his father, a barker we’ve seen before. The barker goes ballistic when he sees what Frankie did to the gypsy — you’re only supposed to do that to the locals! He thinks hard of what to do, while putting the $100 back in his little strongbox — only to discover that the rest of the cash is missing. (Yes, that was Richie’s real mission, and it’s Richie Screw-Up #1.) He beats on Frankie and makes him hit himself, and when the mask falls off we see that he’s hideously deformed — his head is bulbous and distended in the middle, as if it had been trying to become two heads in the womb. (And by the way, it’s his younger brother on display in the freakshow.)

Then comes Richie Screw-Up #2: His lighter drops through the slats into the bedroom.

Most of the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse through the locked Funhouse, and it’s very effective, a good mix of shock scares, ominous carnival props, chases, and death scenes. It’s almost good enough to make up for the first half hour. Almost.

Speaking of that interminable half hour, I have to give you the denouement of little Joey’s travels: Nothing. He catches a glimpse of the deformed guy, gets caught by a carnie, passes out or gets knocked unconscious (I’m not sure which), his parents come and get him, and he goes home without talking. (We do get the effective moment of Amy seeing her parents drive away as she screams through a fan which obscures her voice — but that’s not effective enough a scene to justify the little whelp’s presence throughout the movie.)

And I have to tell you about one of the deaths. Richie is naturally first; a noose drops from the ceiling and pulls him up through a trapdoor. When the panic finally subsides, the survivors see a cart coming down the track with a shadowing shape in it; Buzz takes a battleax he’s stolen from one of the dummies and chops at the shape. It’s Richie, and Buzz has just lost his axe, because it’s buried securely up to the haft in Richie’s skull.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 2 (plus 12 pasties from the strip show)
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0 (lots, actually, but they’re all fakes inside the Funhouse)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Kevin Conway, the barker, was Kahless on the 6th season TNG “Rightful Heir”