The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Funhouse (1981)

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In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower.

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival.

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse.

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again. It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another.

It is a film best left with your brain checked out. Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks. Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

31 Days of Horror: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

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One of the fun things about being a physical media collector is getting to display your stuff. Digital collections are great, but all you have to show for it is a hard drive (yes I know it is the actual art – the music, the films, the writing – that truly matters not the physical objects, but still…).

I love Steelbooks, collector’s editions, and Blu-rays with fun artwork. Sometimes the releases come with collectibles. Sometimes they come with really cool collectibles. The new Dark Sky 4K UHD edition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lifesized plastic chainsaw! How cool is that?

The movie is great, too. An all-time horror classic.

You can read my full film review and the set over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

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The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror movies of the 1970s. It is gritty, dirty, and full of Texas sweat. Like a lot of films from that decade, it is documentarian in style, not realistic exactly but textile, you can feel it in your bones – the heat, the dirt, the blood.

In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is totally ’80s in every way. It is a neon, day glow, music video of a film that doesn’t take anything seriously except for its attempts to have serious fun with the material.

It stars Dennis Hopper as Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright the uncle of two of the victims of the first film. The movie is set thirteen years after the original film and an opening scrawl informs us that the crazed chainsaw-wielding cannibals from the first film are still on the loose and on the move. We see them chase down a couple of frat boys driving recklessly on the highway and cut them up.

The boys were on the telephone with a local radio DJ, “Stretch” (Caroline Williams) when the attack occurs and she recorded the entire incident. She takes the recording to Lefty and the two of them go on the search for the killers.

Before long they are trapped inside an underground funhouse full of leftover amusement park junk, skeletons, skulls, and dismembered corpses.

Leatherface (Bill Johnson) falls in love with Stretch, while his family members chop up humans and turn the meat into chile to sell for the famous Oklahoma University vs Texas football game.

It is hard to explain just how over-the-top nutso this film really is. It is intentionally ridiculous, verging on camp. For the first twenty minutes or so I was really annoyed by it. I love the original film and this seemed like a terrible parody of it. Then I realized that was kind of the point and learned to sit back and enjoy myself.

More or less. It really is a bit too much. I can handle my gore pretty well, and I’m not opposed to using excess to create comedy. But eventually, it becomes boring. I was exhausted by the end.

At least Dennis Hopper seemed to be enjoying himself.

Salem’s Lot (1979)

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I was slow coming ’round to Stephen King. Growing up I was more of a Dean Kontz man. I read the short story The Langoliers when I was in high school and loved it, but for some reason didn’t even both finishing the other short stories in the book much less read any other King. In college, I read Dolores Claiborne, and loved it, and then didn’t get around to reading any other King books until a few years later. And so it went for a long time. I’d read a King book, love it, and then not pick one up again for many months or years. And then four or five years ago I got a copy of the Mr. Mercedes audiobook from the library and really dug it, then picked up the sequel, Finder’s Keepers, and I was off to the races. I’ve been reading him steadily ever since.

I read ‘Salem’s Lot about 12 years ago and absolutely loved it. I’m a sucker for vampire stories and King tells a really good one. It remains one of my favorite novels of his. Tobe Hooper directed a two-part TV miniseries back in 1979 and I decided to rewatch it this week. It is surprisingly good.

The story concerns Ben Mears (David Soul) a writer (the first of many times the protagonist in a King story would have that occupation) who grew up in the small town of Salem’s Lot, but moved away as a boy. He comes back to write about a spooky old house up on a hill that has a sordid history and is rumored to be haunted. He plans on renting it but as it turns out the house has just been purchased by the mysterious Richard Straker (James Mason, completely enjoying himself), and his absent partner Kurt Barlow.

Turns out Barlow is an ancient vampire and Straker is his familiar. But the movie takes its time getting to that part. First Ben has to meet Susan (Bonnie Bedelia), the romantic interest, plus other assortments of characters. It isn’t until the second part of the movie, more than 90 minutes into its three-hour runtime that we actually see the vampire. Mysterious things do happen, people get sick, a kid dies, a dog is murdered, etc., but Hooper keeps the pace slow and the eeriness high.

There is quite a lot of padding, as one would expect from a TV movie made in 1979. And the production values fit within that genre as well. But Hooper gives some good jump scares and several truly spooky scenes. There’s one in which a vampire kid floats into another kid’s room which is an all-timer. The look of the main vampire is very Nosferatu-esque and pretty darn terrific.

It is a film that, if you consider the budget and its limitations, comes across as surprisingly great, and well worth watching.