The Funhouse

Will Menaker3.5

Despite all the carnie grotesques in this movie, the best part for me was when a random old man points a shotgun at a boy he sees walking along the side of the road for no reason other than laughs.

Ian West5.0

A great location oozing with small town carnival atmos, filled with a solid cast of miscreants/jerk teenagers, frankenstein masked human-cow (?) mutant hybrid, and Tobe Hooper’s deep fried scuzz on display—as well as his macabre humor and knack for ramping up endings into loud soundwaved lunacy overdrive. 1981 was such an insane year for slasher movies and The Funhouse opening with callbacks to Halloween, Psycho, and Universal Monsters (Glenn Strange F-Stein poster!!!) before deciding to spend at least 30 or 40 legit minutes experiencing a local town carnival... and it was never boring for me—I could smell the funnel cake, corn dogs, and carnivale mystique! My ex girlfriend’s family were carnival folk via their food truck business and I spent a big chunk of my 20’s at town fairs and carnivals... working the kitchen and hanging out with some of the hardest working people I’d ever met, so this movie hits a little spot inside me that will always smell the cotton candy or fresh kettle corn while creepy carny music plays in the background like some offbeat transmission from nowhere land where time never changes and old guys jerk off behind tents in public because people are disgusting and creepy.Anyway, this manages to follow up a sleazy (realistic carnival hobo/pervy bum scenes!) yet legit carnival experience first act with a weirdo $100 fortune teller handjob mutant murder scene before sprawling into psycho Kevin Conroy carnival barker and ‘son’ terrorizing hooligan castaways looking for a harmless overnight thrill. The titular funhouse with its crazy automated puppets/insane lighting/loud noises looks perfect—a demented/trashed up Americana Hooper setting, with the Phantom of the Paradise in it, a wicked Kevin Conroe as THREE different carnival barkers, amazing score, and a final act showdown that keeps getting more intense/louder with each passing moment before that memorable early morning trash filled empty carnival final scene etches itself into the memory banks.I dunno... I love this movie and I love Tobe Hooper—this weirdo deep fried southern gothic grime battered filth carnival ride of a movie rules and is absolutely one of his best pictures as far as I’m concerned.

Matt!4.0

Have you ever wanted to take a peek under the hood of the things we do for “fun”? Tobe Hooper has—and he knows that, deep down, so have you. The Funhouse gets heat for lacking what people typically expect from a grindhouse slasher; the kills & jump scares are few and the avert-your-eyes gore is held at bay for the vast majority of the movie—but that’s not what the film is going for. Yes, there are mischievous teens doing mischievous teen things and an eventual final girl showdown with an unkillable killer, but the true horror is to be found in the little moments that Hooper snowballs into palpable dread. Nearly the entire first hour is just a simple American night out at the trashy local carnival, peppered with overwhelmingly bright colors, flashing lights, deliriously cheerful merry-go-round music, and unnerving animatronic dolls; attractions that we at one point deemed “amusement” but which now upon adult reflection inspire a sense of unsettling fear, the fear that comes with seeing hints and pockets of the filthy insides we suspect accompany such American pastimes in the form of toothless, grinning carnies and withered chain-smoking fortune tellers. The average middle-class American has no idea what that grimy underworld could hold; maybe we’re afraid of what we might find, or what we think we might find. Maybe what we’d find would just be the sadness of outcasts looking to live a normal life a la Freaks, or maybe it’d be a mutant Sloth from The Goonies running around murdering overly curious locals. Hooper plays on this fear in the same way that he turned the scary empty backwoods of Texas into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: by turning off the lights, cutting the music, and casting sweeping overhead shots of a now quiet, lifeless carnival lot, subsequently creating an atmosphere so chilling and frozen and building tension so claustrophobic and fragile that a pin drop could make it all explode into a world of outright terror. And from there, all of our worst irrational nightmares become reality. Maybe it’s the innocence of our youth being shellshocked by the overt cruelty and sleaziness of the real world. Maybe it’s the entitled horniness and delinquency of that same youth being deservedly punished by the dirty societal underbelly that we step on and take for granted. Either way, The Funhouse shows us what we didn’t want to want to see. It’s icky and skeevy and weird and scary, all in a way that tickles the dark side of our imagination and makes our hair stand straight as we willingly enter the spooky dust-covered tent of unknown terrors, to only reemerge with a soiled soul once the cold dawn has broken—and it’s one of Hooper’s absolute best.Underrated Movies that More People Should See