Cinema Speculation

The Funhouse

(1981)

In the sweltering hot Texas summer of ’73, on a threadbare budget in four weeks, with a crew of Texas locals, filmmaker Tobe Hooper fucked around and made one of the greatest movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

To me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the few perfect movies ever made. There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn’t be the goal. Nevertheless, when it’s accomplished (even by accident), it’s an achievement.

I didn’t see TCM when it was first released in 1974. Then, I was still dependent on an adult to take me to see something like that. It wasn’t like my mother forbade me to see it. It’s just she wasn’t interested in going out and seeing something called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (she wouldn’t take me to auditoriums where they held wrestling matches either. So, no Jimmy Superfly Snuka and Porkchop for me). I did see it about two years later, once New Line Cinema acquired the rights and rereleased it on a double feature with Sergio Martino’s terrific Italian giallo Torso.

Rather than a tumble down the rabbit hole of TCM’s perfection, I want to discuss some of Mr. Hooper’s subsequent work. TCM was such a one-of-a-kind beast, there really wouldn’t be any way for him to satisfyingly follow it up.

So it isn’t surprising that Hooper’s next film, Eaten Alive (starring Neville Brand and a hungry crocodile), was initially considered a disappointment. But as more people started seeing it on home video in the eighties, its reputation among genre aficionados started improving. It’s no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s effectively sleazy and spooky. Most of the film takes place in one location, a shanty hotel located at the lip of a swamp. And Hooper does a tremendous job with the cheap but effective set. Neville Brand is a hoot as the batshit maniac Judd who runs the Starlight Hotel. The establishment’s main attraction is a huge crocodile that Judd’s got penned up for the tourists. But it would appear the hotel owner’s main forte is murdering his guests, especially sexy young females (though why any female would choose to stay at this dump is the picture’s biggest leap of faith), then disposing of the bodies by feeding them to his croc. The plot thickens when a weird married couple and their seven-year-old daughter check in to the Starlight as guests (Chainsaw’s Marilyn Burns and Phantom of the Paradise’s William Finley, giving unglued performances that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Waters feature). The croc ends up eating both the little girl’s dog and her daddy. Judd ends up capturing and terrorizing the mother. The little girl gets away, and the raving lunatic’s efforts to catch her lead to Judd’s inevitable final resting place inside the crocodile’s belly.

The film has an entertaining combination of genuinely spooky and eerie ambiance, a sexual sleaze factor that makes it resemble an early seventies roughie, and high-pitched camp performances played by a tired-out cast of familiar puffy faces.

Any fans of actress Carolyn Jones (who was one of the coolest females in fifties films) will be shocked to see how terrible she looks in this. Yet her characterization of a bayou whorehouse madam is surprisingly specific and convincingly authentic.

Roberta Collins, one of my favorite New World Pictures starlets (The Big Doll House, Caged Heat, and Matilda the Hun in Death Race 2000), plays her opening reel role as one of Jones’ prostitutes and Judd’s first victim surprisingly serious (it’s the film’s most effective reel).

And a young, full of gage Robert Englund is just flat out sensational.

As opposed to George Romero’s Creepshow and the Tales from the Crypt TV series, which killed themselves trying to capture the look and the aesthetic of the E.C. Horror Comics, Hooper’s flick captures the humorously mean-spirited repulsion of the lurid magazine without seemingly trying.

I saw Eaten Alive before I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre, during the week it played in Los Angeles (naturally at the Carson Twin Cinema) on a double feature with a mondo documentary about the occult called Journey into the Beyond, narrated by John Carradine. It supposedly contained footage of a real exorcism (I didn’t buy that, but it looked pretty good). Because of the newspaper movie ad, I was aware this crocodile movie was directed by the same guy who did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I went to the film that night with the thirty-seven-year-old fellow that rented an empty room in my mom’s house named Floyd.*

Floyd and I loved Eaten Alive.

Not because either of us thought it was a great movie. We both felt, for a cheap horror flick, it wasn’t bad. And a few moments were better than that. We liked the actors. We liked the sleaziness. We especially appreciated the effective (Jaws-like) jump scare—when the crocodile suddenly busts through the railing and snatches William Finley from behind. But most of all we loved Robert Englund as the butt-fucking, shit-talking, white trash Buck.

As soon as the movie begins—right off the bat—it starts with a shot of a tentative Roberta Collins, shot through the V frame of Buck’s Levi clad pant legs, as he says off-screen:

“My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck.”

Floyd turned to me and asked incredulously, “What did he say?”

I repeated, “My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck.”

At the repeating of that line, Floyd burst out laughing. And when Floyd got the giggles it was impossible not to laugh with him. So the two of us started laughing. And then, right at the beginning of the movie, we got into the single biggest case of the giggles I ever fell into during a movie. And then when Buck tried to fuck Roberta Collins in the ass, we fell out again. We laughed about that Buck/fuck line for the first whole twenty minutes of the movie (the most serious part of the film). Just as soon as one of us would calm down and start trying to reclaim their shit, the other one would laugh again, and that would set both of us off for another four minutes.

At the world premiere of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, Gael García Bernal told me the same thing happened to him and Diego Luna when Brad Pitt said the line in the Musso and Frank parking lot, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.”

He said they laughed so hard and so long, Gael’s girlfriend started getting mad at them.

In a normal theatre (i.e., not a grindhouse) other patrons might have been annoyed by Floyd and me. But there was always a general malaise and apathy to sparsely populated grindhouse audiences (packed grindhouse audiences, with good action movies, were the exact opposite).

Eventually, we got our shit back together and settled down and watched the movie. But we waited impatiently for Buck’s return. And about forty minutes later, he did. The minute we saw Robert Englund’s face, we burst out laughing again. We weren’t trying to be silly, we just couldn’t help it. Consequently, we didn’t love the movie, but we loved watching the movie. And on the drive home, we laughed ourselves silly about the Buck/fuck line all over again.

Soon after, I started noticing Robert Englund showing up in other movies (this was years before Nightmare on Elm Street). A Star Is Born, Big Wednesday, and my favorite post-Eaten Alive appearance, Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers.

I’d tell Floyd, “Hey man, I just saw Buck in another movie [Floyd never knew his real name, he was just always Buck].”

Needless to say, I have very fond memories of watching Eaten Alive during its one-week Los Angeles engagement in 1976.

Then Tobe Hooper did the two-part/two-night TV movie adaption of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which received some of the best reviews of any TV movie made up to that time. Judith Crist in TV Guide gave it a rave, as well as the TV critic for the Los Angeles Times who said it was one of the best filmed vampire tales of all time!

I missed the movie when it first aired because I was performing in a play at that time (this was a good five years before I had a VHS recorder). I not only read those good reviews, but I read the extensive coverage of the film in the reigning horror magazine of its day, Fangoria.

George Romero said in the pages of that magazine that Salem’s Lot was his favorite King adaptation. He added, “Yeah, Carrie was good but not as good as the book.” (I don’t agree. And neither does King.) Actress Marie Windsor, who was in both Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, said Hooper was the best young director she’d worked with since Kubrick. She called him “Another Stanley.”

Bob Martin, the editor of Fangoria, wrote, “Hooper’s adaptation showed much more understanding of King’s work and the horror genre than was displayed in Kubrick’s The Shining” (this was back when the horror press completely took King’s side in his beef with Kubrick).

So when I finally saw it, I was prepared for something great.

And man was I disappointed.

To me, it just seemed like a stretched-out TV movie done in a very TV style (and I like TV movies). Even in terms of two-night TV-movie events based on classic horror novels featuring James Mason, Jack Smight’s Frankenstein: The True Story was way better.

I tried to watch it again a couple of years ago and it was just too dull. I turned it off after about twenty-five minutes.

The only thing that held up for me was David Soul’s performance. It reminded me of what an intense actor he was back in those days (the pilot TV movie for Starsky and Hutch is another good reminder). To put that in perspective, David Soul’s performance was the one negative Fangoria had about Hooper’s adaptation.

So after the success of Salem’s Lot, Tobe Hooper landed his first studio feature film deal when Universal Pictures hired him to helm their horror quickie The Funhouse.

For the readers of Fangoria, along with John Carpenter, George Romero, David Cronenberg, and later Joe Dante (he gave the best interviews), Tobe Hooper was a superstar. The main readership of the magazine were boys thirteen to twenty-three (of which I was one).

It’s kind of cool to think back on a magazine that encouraged its adolescent readership to subscribe so fully to Andrew Sarris’ Auteur theory. In the eighties, inside the pages of Fangoria magazine, it was horror film movie directors that were its readers’ heroes, along with special effect makeup artists (Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin). This was a drastic difference when compared to Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the leading horror movie mag of adolescents ten years before. They may have, from time to time, featured an interview with the director of a current horror flick, but they weren’t the mag’s name attractions. That spot was reserved for the Universal monsters (the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon). As well as the reigning horror movie stars—both old (Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr.) and current (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing).

So naturally, Tobe Hooper’s first studio feature received big coverage in Fangoria, including in the February 1981 issue #11, the cover featuring makeup artist Rick Baker’s creature design for the film’s deformed, pathetic antagonist.

Even sister mag Cinefantastique (which dealt in horror but leaned more towards science fiction) featured a nice piece on the making of The Funhouse including a cool photograph of the director.

So for readers of the magazine, The Funhouse wasn’t just another new horror film ad in the movie section of your local newspaper, appearing suddenly out of nowhere. We were well aware of it, had been following reports of its production, and were awaiting its release.

The biggest horror movie boom in cinema history occurred from 1979 through 1982. The slasher film cycle was in full swing with a seemingly endless string of titles. But also monster movies, animal attack movies, Jaws rip-offs, Alien rip-offs, Omen rip-offs, Carrie rip-offs, haunted house movies, ghost stories, vampire films, science fiction terror, as well as the last gasp of theatrically released Italian horror and New World Pictures fright fests like Humanoids from the Deep.

In 1981 it seemed every two weeks another horror title was playing at a theatre or drive-in near you. And it was amid this horror movie glut when—in its opening week—I went to see The Funhouse at the UA Del Amo Mall cinemas.

My verdict?

I enjoyed it, well enough, but considered it a touch on the mediocre side.

Then sometime in 2011, I went on a slasher film kick. I rewatched all the slasher films I had seen before, and caught all the ones I had missed or ignored. And after my rewatch of The Funhouse I was a little surprised. I found myself much, much more impressed with Hooper’s direction (the staging of scenes, his dynamic coverage, and the cynical, tawdry, and downright nasty tone he carries throughout the picture), cinematographer Andrew Laszlo’s photography—his towering crane shots—and his imaginative focus pulls, but especially production designer Mort Rabinowitz’s creepy carnival and his immensely effective funhouse set.

But the big surprise was Larry Block’s screenplay.

At first view, it may appear simple and obvious, but on the second go-round, it revealed both a level of depth and even sophistication that forced me to reconsider the whole film.

While movies have had no problem depicting life with a traveling circus (Chaplin’s The Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, Circus World, Toby Tyler, Big Top Pee-wee), carnival stories have been further and farther between.

Of course, the two indisputable classics in the genre are Tod Browning’s Freaks and Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley. Freaks is rightly recognized as a towering classic of cinema’s golden age, which once seen is never forgotten (what the fuck is that Pinhead girl?).

And while Nightmare Alley is also rightly considered a classic, I still think it’s underrated. To me Nightmare Alley is as good as studio filmmaking ever gets. Tyrone Power (who I’ve never been fond of) is fucking sensational in the movie. And the script adaptation by Jules Furthman (one of my handful of nominees for greatest Hollywood screenwriter of all time) is excellent (it could have never been made in the fifties). Power doesn’t say Furthman’s dialogue, he sings it. Nightmare Alley feels every inch like an Italian neorealism movie from the same era. The film could swap casts with Bitter Rice, Tyrone Power/Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling/Joan Blondell, Silvana Mangano/Coleen Gray, and both films would still hold their same place of pride in film history.

I’m also fond of Roger Corman’s Carnival Rock, which plays like a Roger Corman directed Josef von Sternberg film. It hits its Pagliacci imagery a little too on the nose. But the card game showdown between David J. Stewart and future director Brian Hutton is one of my favorite Corman-directed scenes.

Growing up, my favorite carnival film was Elvis’ superior vehicle, Roustabout. In that era of “Elvis Presley movies” (Elvis movies weren’t real movies, they were “Elvis Presley movies”) it was a pretty entertaining little picture chock-full of cool elements, Elvis entering the movie on a motorcycle—dressed head to toe in black leather (in what looks like the same outfit he’ll later make iconic in the ’69 comeback special), a strong Big Valley era Barbara Stanwyck as his colead, a one-line bit at the beginning by Raquel Welch, the best soundtrack of any of Elvis’ color films, including a rarity for the King on film—Elvis singing a cover of somebody else’s hit, the Coasters’ Little Egypt, and the only film where Elvis gets to demonstrate his Ed Parker-taught karate moves.

Only a year before The Funhouse, Lorimar released Robert Kaylor’s Carny starring Gary Busey, Jodie Foster, and Robbie Robertson. Carny was written by Thomas Baum, a very talented screenwriter who also wrote the compelling horror film The Sender. But it’s directed by a very untalented director, Robert Kaylor—if you can even call what he does in the film directing. Baum’s script and his self-penned (superior) novelization shows the seedy realistic side of carny life, concentrating more on the grifting Carny games, which lure marks to the midway and fleece them of their hard-earned cash. The film wants to do for life on the midway what Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham later did for minor league baseball: take you on a tour of a world you never really knew anything about, and by the time the picture’s over you leave an expert, even speaking the lingo with confidence.

And to a certain degree, Carny is successful in that endeavor. Nevertheless, the missed and fumbled opportunities add up to, ultimately, an unsatisfying experience.

If Carny has an authorial voice, it isn’t due to anyone behind the camera, it’s due to the unique combination of manic energy and beyond-the-beyond naturalism that Gary Busey displays in front of the camera. Carny was the actor’s follow-up to his breakout Oscar nominated turn as Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story. The film positioned Busey, after a decade of character actor work, as an exciting leading man (at one time he was attached to Jim McBride’s superlative remake of Breathless as Jesse Lujack aka Jesse Burns aka Jesse Lee Burns, the character that Richard Gere ultimately essayed).

Believe it or not, the manic hee-hawing buffoon of reality television was (pre-motorcycle accident), one of the seventies’ greatest actors. Not just a talented journeyman character actor, but an acting giant. Just ask other acting giants that performed with him, like Dustin Hoffman (Straight Time), Martin Sheen (The Execution of Private Slovick), and Jeff Bridges (The Last American Hero).

Busey had a gift for a highly theatrical version of naturalism that was unlike any of his peers. Naturally, it was unlike anybody else, because it sprang from his soul. Gary Busey had such a deeply felt way of saying lines, you couldn’t believe anyone wrote his dialogue. It just always sounded like it sprang fully formed out of him. The only other actor of his era that shared the same combination of naturalism and dynamic intensity was Robert Blake. What most actors pass off as naturalism is just aw-shucks mumbling. It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: “What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that’s not what you pay actors to do.”

Busey’s unaffected line readings were documentary-real, but backed by a dramatic storytelling drive that most naturalistic actors don’t possess.

Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, like Brian De Palma’s Blow Out of the same year, starts with a parody of both the then-popular slasher film genre and the shower scene from Psycho.

The film’s opening shot (like Blow Out, the POV of a killer with a knife) looks around the bedroom of a young boy obsessed with monster movies. Posters of Karloff’s Frankenstein and Lugosi’s Dracula line his walls (one of the benefits of the film being produced by Universal). As well as a wall collage of Halloween masks, which the unseen POV perspective character slips on his face (like in the opening of Halloween). As well, a section of the bedroom wall is covered in a collection of medieval weapons (you can imagine a mother letting her son pin up a Frankenstein movie poster, but a collection of weapons?).

Meanwhile, the movie crosscuts with the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, who would later play Mozart’s wife in Amadeus), who will end up being the film’s requisite Final Girl, as she enters her bathroom and strips off her clothes to take a shower.

The Coed Frenzy fake-out opening of Blow Out fooled a lot of viewers (not me), but the fake-out opening of The Funhouse, while fun, doesn’t fool anybody. Even though the only character we’ve physically seen is Amy, we know from the style of the little boy’s bedroom, this is her horror freak little brother trying to scare the shit out of her.

Then, years before Gus Van Sant, Hooper repeats a series of shots from Hitchcock’s classic shower set piece as the knife-wielding intruder enters the bathroom, rips open the shower curtain, and stabs at the screaming young girl. Then Hooper reveals the knife is bendable plastic, Amy rips off the attacker’s mask, and we see it’s her laughing ten-year-old asshole little brother Joey (Shawn Carson).

We’re not supposed to take any of this seriously, it would appear, but the sequence does illustrate a repellent quality that almost all the film’s characters demonstrate. As well as a cynical and disturbing undertone that pulsates throughout the picture.

Joey’s vicious attack isn’t that of a mischievous little scamp. He’s a bona fide little creep with an obvious tendency towards sexual violence. For a younger brother to walk into an older sister’s room and catch her stark naked is enough to make any teenage girl hit the roof. But to rip open the shower curtain and attack her naked body with a phony butcher knife?

That sounds like, “we need to have a discussion about Joey.”

Yet, Amy’s reaction seems similarly disturbed. She throws on a bathrobe, chases him down the hall, grabs him by the front of his shirt, throwing the boy around, screaming at him in a violent rage, “I’m gonna make you pay for this Joey! I’m gonna get you Joey, if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

And when she says it, it doesn’t sound like a cliche or she’s just saying an overused expression. It sounds like she’s going to fuck him up! She’d like to fuck him up now, but she’s got a date coming over and she has to finish getting ready.

Really?

Why not just tell your mother what this little asshole did? Telling mom and dad should suggest a harsher comeuppance.

Instead, the scene suggests that Amy and Joey are perpetrating a violent and sadistic private war against each other. A war they keep secret from their parents (throughout the film it’s demonstrated that Amy and Joey never tell their parents anything).

Now you can take the scene at face value, and come to the conclusion we’re not meant to invest in the realistic implications of this opening. It’s just a Hitchcock homage put in to start this horror film off with a bang. It’s a goof, it’s a joke, nothing more. But the scene does affect the viewer. Nor does screenwriter Block present this opening as just a phony scare scene that we’re supposed to forget then move on to the real movie. Amy’s words (“I’m gonna make you pay for this Joey! I’m gonna get you if it’s the last thing I ever do!”) play back much later in the film and affect the entire outcome of the storyline. And when it doubles back into the story again, it suggests that the antagonism between Joey and Amy isn’t mere sibling rivalry, but a true callous animosity that exists between the youngsters. As opposed to the screenplay’s other (mostly stock) characters, Joey is an interesting deviation from type. In the early eighties, the monster movie aficionado little boy whose room is covered in horror film posters and Frankenstein busts was a new age horror trope. They were usually meant to be a stand-in for a young version of either the screenwriter or the director or the grown horror fans in the audience (they always seemed to be a ten-year-old Joe Dante). And, normally, they’re the most lovable character in the whole fucking movie (i.e., Corey Feldman in Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter). And in this group of children, Joey stands alone. Block gives the boy an entire B storyline that sets up how Joey is going to save the day and rescue his sister. Only to deliciously flip the script and have the malevolent little boy consciously doom his sibling to her ultimate fate.

Larry Block’s deceptively thin screenplay tells the tale of four teenagers on a double date, who visit a seedy traveling carnival passing through town (we’ve already learned from Amy’s father that two girls in a nearby municipality were found dead after visiting the same carnival last year).

Each of the four teens is a remarkably unappealing representation of the stock teenage characters in a slasher film.

Cooper Huckabee is Buzz, the insensitive, muscle-headed, muscle-car driving, hunky jerk jock who’s Amy’s date.

Miles Chapin, an actor I’ve always been allergic to, is as annoying as usual as Richie, the wimpy-creepy-bespectacled best friend of Buzz. Chapin goes through the whole film with a sweater tied around his neck (which in those days was egregious enough for me to hate him on sight).

Richie’s date is the blond-haired slightly slutty Liz, played by the bizarrely named Largo Woodruff, who waltzes through the entire picture in tight, tomato-red pants (a nice touch).

From the moment Berridge’s Amy climbs into Buzz’s muscle car, she starts transforming into the uptight final girl archetype. Yet after that weird opening scene, we never really like her. She’s not as unlikable as the repellent group of fuck faces she attends the carnival with. But for a slasher film final girl, she’s singularly unsympathetic. And our feelings about her don’t change.

We never like her.

We just dislike her less than Buzz, Richie, and Liz.

While the carny lingo and description of the crooked games on the midway in Robert Kaylor’s Carny strike the viewer as authentic, the seedy, shitty carnival of Hooper’s The Funhouse is both more compelling and entertaining. Carny focuses more on the shady midway games and how their crooked operators manipulate both the games and the marks. But, for the most part, it ignores the sordid attractions and performers (the exception is one of the film’s best moments when the carnival fat man sings a blues version of Fats Domino’s The Fat Man).

This is not a mistake Hooper makes. The kids take in the Freak Show, and we in the audience get a gander at some real animal oddities (a two-headed cow and a bovine with a cleft palate). The freak show barker’s spiel (“Alive, alive, alive! These are all creatures of God, ladies and gentlemen, not man”) stays in your head and haunts the rest of the film like a subtextual narrator.

The three dancers in the hoochie-coochie tent seem as real as a gas station toilet. And the film’s three older actors, Kevin Conway, William Finley, and Sylvia Miles all give entertaining guest star turns as the carnival’s featured performers.

De Palma regular William Finley (who was also in Hooper’s Eaten Alive) as a derelict, flask-sipping magician (Marko the Magnificent) performs an especially inspired bit.

It’s Chapin’s sneaky, troublemaking Richie who gets the bright idea that it would be a gas for the four of them to spend the night in the funhouse. And naturally the other three idiots go along with the stupid plan. But before the quarrelsome quartet sneak into the funhouse, setting the film’s rigid slasher structure in motion, Hooper takes the viewer on a vivid tour of the sordid pleasures found in this bottom feeding rung of entertainment. Made all the more vivid by cinematographer Andrew Laszlo’s nighttime photography and the flashing and blinking colored lights of the trashy enterprise. And as the director guides our perspective we start noticing little things. The three featured barkers (for the freak show, the hoochie-coochie tent, and the funhouse) are all played by the same actor, Broadway’s Kevin Conway.

And, little by little, due to his slightly haunted demeanor, we start noticing the stumbling worker of the funhouse ride, with the oversized Frankenstein mask he wears over his head. And since it’s a Universal picture, Hooper can use the classic Jack Pierce flat-headed Frankenstein’s Monster design. And the historic Karloff monster design, put to such a tawdry use, has an iconic power (like Mickey Mouse redrawn as a rat). We also take notice that while our four leads are off-putting, this figure in the Frankenstein mask is immediately sympathetic. The character never loses our sympathy, but once he removes the mask and we see the deformed cleft-headed face underneath, he’s never as poignant as he was. Mostly because the creature design by Rick Baker (the best special effects makeup artist in the business) is surprisingly bad; ironically, it’s the character’s supposedly real face that looks like the monster mask. Also, behind the mask is a San Francisco mime named Wayne Doba, who’s really effective before his Rick Baker freak face is revealed. Once he loses the Frankenstein mask, out goes Doba’s previously finely crafted performance and he spends the rest of the movie jumping around and screaming. Plus the slender and small Doba (who looks about the size of Joel Grey) nowhere near fits the description of the character in the script, where he’s supposed to be powerfully built, and eight feet tall! Yet, in an ass-backward way, it’s one of the reasons we never lose our sympathy for this character.

Now while I enjoyed the movie in 1981, one of the big reasons I wasn’t more impressed after my first viewing was its similarity to another slasher film that came out the same year, former gay porn director Tom DeSimone’s Linda Blair-led effort, Hell Night. Even though the story and setup of both films were practically identical, in terms of script, dialogue, performances, and characters, Hell Night was far superior to The Funhouse.

The one area that Hooper’s film has it over the Linda Blair picture is in production designer Morton Rabinowitz’s impressively eerie funhouse set (Hell Night is set in an abandoned mansion). Assisted by Jose Duarte’s art direction and Tom Coll’s set decoration, Rabinowitz’s creepy set manages to balance the difficult combination of being the showcase funhouse set that a movie titled The Funhouse requires, yet is still believable as part of this low rent truck and van carnival. The ghoulish faces and the rickety movements of the authentic, paint chipped, herky-jerky animatronic funhouse dolls are the film’s real stars. That’s why Hooper features them during the opening credits (we remember them from the opening and look forward to spotting them later).

Another reason (back in ’81) I didn’t like the film more was how little I gave a fuck about the lead kids. That doesn’t mean the leads are bad actors. Berridge could be better, and Largo Woodruff is no Suki Goodwin, but while I’ve never liked Miles Chapin, you can’t deny he is perfectly cast as shit-heel Richie. And Cooper Huckabee, like John Travolta’s Billy Nolan in Carrie, has a bit of scumbag pizzaz (in her review of Carrie, Pauline Kael said Travolta’s Billy Nolan could be “Warren Beatty’s low life younger brother.” Huckabee could be Harrison Ford’s).

Except for the poor guy in the Frankenstein mask, nobody in the movie is sympathetic. But now I see that as part of the film’s subtextual strategy. Doba’s character is listed in the credits as “The Monster.” Which—considering he’s clearly presented as a man with a horrible birth defect—is remarkably insensitive (“These are creatures of God, ladies and gentlemen, not man!”). Even Rick Baker, in his Fangoria interview, mentioned this aspect of the character gave him trepidation. Baker said, “It’s a birth-defect type monster. After I started thinking about it for a while, I felt real guilty about making that deformity a monster. It’s so easy to take horror straight from nature, because there are some pretty horrifying real things. I just didn’t feel right about making it a straight freak, so I added a little more to it. I hope it comes across that way, because it still has a lot of the birth defect aspect to it.”

Easily the film’s best scene is when the pitiful, naive, and confused young man, hiding inside his Frankenstein mask, tries to buy sex from the Carnival’s phony Gypsy fortune teller (Sylvia Miles). The teens hiding in the funhouse peep and giggle at this poor pathetic wretch as he gets a handjob from the mean and far more monstrous than he is Sylvia Miles. “The Monster’s” inability to control himself leads to him having an episode (remember those two dead girls from the nearby town?) that the snickering jerks witness. Soon it’s revealed that Kevin Conway, the scary funhouse barker, is the boy’s father. And it’s he who insists the boy kill the teenagers (“Ain’t as if I’m asking you to do something you ain’t never done before. . . . Them two little half-pint Girl Scouts in Memphis.”).

Significantly, Kevin Conway originated the role of the freak show barker in the original production of the theatrical version of The Elephant Man. And for a while, The Funhouse resembles a slasher film version of that story. Except, compared to this poor thing, John Merrick had it good. He gets Anne Bancroft reading Juliet to his Romeo.

The best this poor bastard can do is a hateful handjob from Sylvia Miles!