THE FUNHOUSE (1981)
I came across this movie while flipping channels one afternoon before going
out to run errands. The title sequence of eerily lit amusement attractions
drew me in and made me decide to watch “just for five more minutes.”
The Funhouse kept me, almost against my will, from getting up from the
chair for the next two hours.
The plot is pretty standard, really; young Amy Harper (Elizabeth Berridge)
goes out on a double-date to the seedy travelling carnival. While
there, she and her friends decide to spend the night in the funhouse after
it’s closed. While there, they see something they shouldn’t have,
and soon they’re not trying to stay in the funhouse any longer. They’re
trying to get out--
alive.
There’s
a moment that one gets–not often, sadly– when watching certain horror movies.
It’s not fear, it’s not horror, it’s something like awe or dread.
I got that feeling when Bela Lugosi as Dracula lifted his cape, stared
straight into the camera and started to walk toward it; when the freaks
crawled through the mud at the end of Freaks; when Robert Mitchum looked
up to the ceiling and raised his hand to smite Shelley Winters in Night
of the Hunter (actually, I get the feeling several times during Night of
the Hunter). And I got that feeling about halfway through The Funhouse,
when Kevin Conway delivers his barker’s spiel about the funhouse while
Elizabeth Berridge stands by, listening. Conway delivers the lines
in a flat
monotone while the oblivious crowd mills about. “You soul cries
for release, you pray for release, but there is no release,” he pauses,
staring directly at Berridge, “from the funhouse.” Conway is describing
the funhouse as hell itself, and no one except for Berridge is listening.
The scene gave me chills, probably as much from its perfection as anything.
It’s perfectly delivered, perfectly written, perfectly directed; it’s the
hat trick of cinema. There are a few other scenes in the movie like
it, but it was the pinnacle for me, man.
The scene also chills, I think, because it points to the horror at the
heart of the film. As in Barth, the funhouse is life itself, and
life, as Conway’s dead man’s tone suggests, ain’t fun. What originally
seemed a slow start, with Berridge and her friends encountering all sorts
of grotesques on the way to the funhouse while essentially dealing with
the dismal lack of choices in their own lives, is in fact the point of
the movie. Everything encountered outside the funhouse is really
just as horrible as what’s encountered in it. The last frames of
The Funhouse suggest that there may be survival, but there is no hope.
Berridge is very good, and Conway is superb. Tobe Hooper's direction
is spot-on, and he and screenwriter Lawrence Block (a mystery novelist
who wrote this under a pseudonym) must have been remarkably in synch to
create so many low key yet effective scenes. This movie isn’t going
to make you pee your pants in fear or anything, but if you’re like me and
you like that odd feeling of unease to prick at your soul, you should give
this obscure little movie a look-see. The Funhouse has continued
to haunt me since I saw it that first time eight months ago. Check
it out.
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