Author Archives: Hud

Funhouse, Pat Sharp’s Mullet and the Barbeau Proxy

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THE FUNHOUSE

3.5 Stars  1981/18/89m

“Pay to get in. Pray to get out!”

A.k.a. Carnival of Terror

Director: Tobe Hooper / Writer: Larry Block / Cast: Elizabeth Berridge, Cooper Huckabee, Kevin Conway, Miles Chapin, Largo Woodruff, Sylvia Miles, Shawn Carson, Wayne Doba.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “He’s a nice guy!” / “When you’re stoned Charles Manson’s a nice guy!”

When Stacie at Final Girl announced that November’s film club subject would be The Funhouse, the first thing that went through my head was this:

You remember it too, don’t you? Yeah that’s it – Pat Sharp’s mullet, those twin hyperactive Aryan cheerleaders, that freaky theme song: “it’s a whole lotta fun, prizes to be won…” etc.

This would not be the only curiosity associated with the viewing that ensued as you will see. Or: if you can’t be bothered to read the interim, scroll down a bit and see for y’self…

Anyway, fortunately for the world at large, she was referring to Tobe Hooper’s neat little slasher flick from that super-fab golden year of 1981.

I hadn’t watched The Funhouse in a few years and only have it on a dusty old VHS so in it was slotted and away we went in amazing full screen grittiness.

Beginning with a brazen homage to both Halloween and Psycho, we’re introduced to our main character Amy: teen, pretty, bratty little brother, likes showers. Well, did until said brat, Joey, scares the beejeesus out of her with a mask and rubber knife, prompting Amy to tell him that she’s gonna get him for that, really get him good!

Amy lies to her folks and tells them she’s off on her date with a guy named Buzz to a movie when in fact they swan off to a travelling carnival. Standard teen dialogues occur, they ride the ferris wheel and visit the freakshow where the animals are alivah…alive, alive, alive.

Meanwhile, Joey had snuck out and followed Amy to the carnival, save for a bizarro scene where some looney toon in a pickup decides to point a shotgun at the poor kid. But then, he was a little shit at the beginning so do we care if he’s blown away? No, not really.

Liz’s boyfriend Richie comes up with the idea of spending the night in the carnival funhouse, pretty much because someone else supposedly did it once. If those somebodies once jumped off a bridge, would Richie? The girls agree and the quartet succeed in hiding in the ride after hours where they make out and spy through the floorboards on the Frankenstein-masked carny paying Madame Zena $100 for a handy. When the volcano erupts too quickly and she refuses to refund him, he strangles her to death.

His pop intonates that sonny boy has killed before and they detect the presence of others in the funhouse, leaving them no choice but to exterminate the newcomers to cover their asses. Slasher goodness ensues.

The Funhouse is very Halloweeny in part: it’s relatively bloodless and trades more on its setting and the predicament of the characters than the grue and the carny – soon unmasked and revealed to be a hideously malformed freakshow with, like, three noses or somethin’!?

Undoubtedly the most inspired moment is when Amy’s parents turn up to pick up a shocked-out-of-his-skin Joey (after a close encounter with the psycho) and she is screaming through an air vent, silenced by the hum of the fan while ‘lil brat bro stares catatonically at the funhouse’s creepy front.

In a seldom-occurring change of pace, I was joined for most of the film by my anti-horror mancub who expanded the lack of features with his very own commentary: “Why is she screaming so much?” / “Turn it doooooown!” / “Ugh, VHS is awful – throw it away!”

Nevertheless, we made it to the end relatively unscathed – more people die, Amy bests the monster and gets away in one piece. Roll credits. And here, here’s where the weirdness truly branched out. By adjusting the tracking and hovering with my iPhone, I captured THIS:

Adrienne Bourbeau!? Who is this impostor? What does she want? Were the cast and crew freaked out by her presence?

Conclusion: Pat Sharp’s mullet was a hell of a lot scarier than the monster. Adrienne Barbeau need watch her back. The Funhouse is good and I like it more than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but not as much as Poltergeist.

Blurbs-of-interest: Miles Chapin was also in Pandemonium; Hooper later directed Texas Chainsaw 2 and the Toolbox Murders remake; Elizabeth Berridge later married Kevin Corrigan, who starred in Some Guy Who Kills People. Executive producer Mark Lester later directed Groupie and produced both Devil’s Prey and The Wisher. “Adrienne Bourbeau” supposedly didn’t work on any more films. Hmmm…

“Mmm, Smeat!”

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CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR

3 Stars  1998/18/80m

“In a deserted town the terror continues!”

Director/Writer: Ethan Wiley / Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Greg Vaughan, Eva Mendez, David Carradine, Fred Williamson, Adam Wylie, Ahmet Zappa, Angela Jones, Dave Buzzotta, Aaron Jackson, Kane Hodder.

Body Count: 18

My favourite Corn sequel from the indefatigable series (presently gearing up for an 8th instalment) is stupid, cheesy and has almost no connection to the previous films outside of horrible children, corn, and the ever-invisible He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

This time, a group of college kids drive out into the boondocks to scatter the ashes of a recently cremated friend, who apparently died bungee jumping!? When they crash their car, a group of mouthy little brats emerge from the cornfield to tell them, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off – which is rich coming from them considering they slaughtered a couple of the group who were driving ahead of the others just hours earlier.

After meeting Kane Hodder and spending the night in a seemingly abandoned farmhouse, dreary heroine Alison realises that her runaway brother is actually part of this very sect!!!

Un-spooked by this coincidence, she elects to stick around and try to rescue her bro, prompting the others to stay too and get mauled by the delinquents: star-to-be Eva Mendez reads approximately one page of the cult’s anti-adult bible and decides to join them, willingly throwing herself into a fiery silo. Others are impaled, sickled, slashed with machetes or blow themselves up, taking some of the murderous moppets with them until only sensible-haired Alison remains to take on the uber-obnoxious child leader, who is in need of Supernanny, big time.

Fields of Terror, like the previous and subsequent instalments, makes little sense, adopting a scattergun approach of cult-cum-slasher movie antics: it’s liberally bloody and occasionally brutal and somehow roped David Carradine into playing the adult leader of the sect. There’s some zesty photographic setups but the flames fizzle out with another boring finale and CG-tastic last second gasp moment.

If you can ignore just how remedial all of this is and don’t mind chowing down a big bowl of obvious, Corn V is an entertaining 80 minutes with comfortably predictable scenarios and quite a likeable cast, peppered with familiar faces – even if most of them clearly look like they don’t want to be there.

Blurbs-of-interest: Eva Mendez/s returned to the genre a couple of years later in Urban Legends: Final Cut; Adam Wylie was in Return to Sleepaway Camp; Alexis Arquette was in Bride of Chucky; aside from playing Jason four times, Kane Hodder has appeared in Behind the Mask, Hatchet and all of its sequels; David Carradine was in Fall Down Dead and Detention (2010).

Dire-logue’s Greatest Hits Volume 2: Jinxing It

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More of those priceless facepalm moments that litter the realm of the slasher pic. This month we celebrate the people who dared say things like, “nothing is going to happen to us if we spend the night at the abandoned discotheque where ten sexy teens were killed one year ago tonight…”

A CRACK IN THE FLOOR (2000): “We made a pact to take these trips ’til we’re old and grey, or we die… Whichever comes first.”

FLASHBACK (1999): “Why do parents always think their kids’ll get killed if they vacation alone?”

THE INITIATION (1983): “[Here’s] to being young, staying young and dying young.” – wish granted

JASON GOES TO HELL (1993): “Looking to smoke some dope, have a little pre-marital sex and get slaughtered?”

LAID TO REST (2009): “I am not getting murdered tonight thanks, I’ve got a funeral to go to tomorrow.”

MANIACAL (2003): “Should we be watching all these slasher movies with my brother on the loose?”

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981): “You gotta come, just to see the dress I’m wearing. Cut down to there, split up to here – I may not get out alive.”

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER (1983): “Mary ran to the cellar…she’d be safe there.”

PARANOID (2000): “If a serial killer was stalking me I think I’d know.”

THE PATH OF EVIL (2005): “Devil’s Lake, contrary to it’s name, is not an evil place.”

THE PROWLER (1981): “This is everybody’s last night together. Some of us’ll never see each other again.”

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987): “Maybe, just maybe, there is a psycho running around here.”

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION (1994): “What if we get into a wreck and crash the car and we all died? They could write a song about it.”

THE UNDERTOW (2003): “That’s it! Nobody’s ever seeing us again!”

WILDERNESS (2006): “So you want me to go out there alone to look for another guy who’s out there alone when nobody’s supposed to go out there alone?”

No more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween

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I’ve watched 8 horror films in the last three days – and also moved the world’s heaviest iron bathtub out through a tiny doorway – Groupie, The Collector, A Night to Dismember, Tormented, Arachnophobia, Superstition, Children of the Corn V, The Funhouse (for Final Girl’s filmclub in a couple of weeks) and, uh, Mannequin on the Move (horror of a different kind).

Paranormal Activity might follow later for the scaredy-I-don’t-like-blood-cats of the house but for the rest of y’all, when you’ve donned your sheets and masks later, remember Laurie, Annie and Lynda, remember to be watchful this All Hallow’s Eve…

Happy Halloween to you all!

VeVo xxx

The Vegan Voorhees Pre-Halloween Horrorfest Part III

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So Groupie was mediocre and The Collector depressed me – next it was on to A Night to Dismember, which I’d heard “things” about, the same way you “hear” “things” about Camp Crystal Lake. Well you would if it existed.

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER

1.5 Stars  1983/69m

Director: Doris Wishman / Writer: Judith J. Kushner / Cast: Samantha Fox, Diane Cummins, Bill Szarka, Saul Meth, Miriam Meth, Frankie Sabat, Chris Smith.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “Someone was calling her – the voice seemed to be coming from the hat box.”

According to the IMDb, according to director Doris Wishman – according to the DVD commentary, the main reason A Night to Dismember sucks harder than a Portsmouth hooker is that a disgruntled lab employee burnt most of the negatives, leaving Wishman to spend some years re-shooting and re-cutting the film into the 69 minute end product.

If you could ever get a headache on to celluloid than this is surely it. There is no original sound, it was all re-recorded and dubbed back on with the haywire plot strung together (or attempted to be) by a narration leaving next to no dialogue for the people on screen.

So the story goes, in October 1986 the Kent family pretty much all get murdered after daughter Vicki (Samantha Fox – no, not that Samantha Fox) is released from an asylum where she had been residing for the past five years after murdering two local boys. Her brother Billy hates her and tries to make her crazy by dressing up in cheapo masks and emerging from a lake to follow her like a zombie.

Some people die pretty much from being lightly tapped by either a machete or the preferred axe. At one juncture, a loving couple are slain with the former weapon, their decapitations seen as shadows against a wall, both are quite literally prodded by the blade and their heads just tumble off. Then, in the next shot, their killer places the featureless plastic head of a mannequin in a fireplace, which we are asked to believe is the noggin of the woman! It’s plain white! It has no hair! Later, a decapitated head actually gets stuck to the axe blade.

Narrator man – supposed to be a detective – babbles on and watches Vicki through a window:

– “Vicki saw me through the shades and started to dance. It had been a long time since any man had paid any attention to her.”

And then he tells us about Vicki’s dream:

– “Vicki felt as though someone faceless was making love to her in bright flashing colours that were changing from one second to the next.”

nighttodismemberSome other people are murdered and then Vicki’s immediate family members begin dying. Here, the actor playing Billy’s hair changes from shot to shot. And I mean changes. It’s a short back and sides one second and then flopping around his shoulders the next, clearly after at least a year’s growth.

The killer is revealed to be Mary shortly afterwards and she is almost immediately haunted by the ghosts of her murder victims. So she runs into the woods. Then into the cellar where she hears a voice coming from a hat box (see Dire-logue). Then she packs a case and leaves and murders a taxi driver. What was her motive? Fucked if I know!

So Vicki was innocent after all but ends up getting strangled by the detective when she starts tapping him with the axe in self defence. Things end with the narrator telling us he knew all the juicy details because the entire family kept diaries.

Wow. 69 minutes has never dragged as much but if you’re really hunting for bad, bad movies then drop anchor here, it’s truly unbelievable. Everything seems to have gone wrong: the music changes completely in a snap from sort of jazzy gameshow theme to tuneless stringy shrieks but almost never attuned to what’s supposed to be happening on screen; the effects work is horrible and the camera work all over the place. Considering the title is a play on A Night to Remember, you’d be hard pressed to ever forget this. Technically speaking the worst film I’ve ever seen but at least it wasn’t a completely uninteresting experience…

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