Here’s a riddle: What do you get when the director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is handed a bigger budget, a sleazy setting, and four teenagers to torment? You’d hope the answer is “a nerve-shredding carnival horror classic.” Instead, you get The Funhouse, a film that spends 96 minutes building tension and then accidentally strangles itself with its own calliope music.
Tobe Hooper, the madman genius behind Chain Saw, was allegedly sober and professional during the making of The Funhouse. Maybe that was the problem. This movie has all the energy of a hungover carnie dragging a corpse to the Tilt-A-Whirl. It’s not scary. It’s not thrilling. It’s barely coherent. It’s just damp, creaky, and filled with enough cigarette smoke to give a Muppet emphysema.
Let’s break it down. The film follows four teenage misfits who decide—on a dare, no less—to spend the night inside a local carnival’s funhouse attraction. Because yes, nothing screams “wild teenage rebellion” like hiding behind mannequins and sneaking joints in a fiberglass Dracula mouth. Of course, they stumble upon something horrible: a murder committed by a deformed man-child in a Frankenstein mask who’s about as terrifying as a waterlogged Chuck E. Cheese animatronic.
The kids, naturally, panic and try to escape—but wouldn’t you know it, they’re locked inside. That’s the movie. That’s the entire movie. Four teens wandering around in the dark, occasionally shouting “We have to get out of here!” while getting picked off by a man who looks like someone microwaved a ventriloquist dummy.
Let’s talk about our heroine, Amy, played by Elizabeth Berridge. She’s meant to be the classic Final Girl, but she spends most of the movie wandering through foggy corridors with all the urgency of someone browsing the Halloween aisle at Rite Aid. Her boyfriend Buzz is a discount Steve Guttenberg with the personality of a yard gnome. Then there’s the stoner sidekick Richie and the “loose” girl Liz, both of whom are so one-dimensional they might as well be holding signs that say “Kill Me Second” and “Kill Me Third.”
You’ll spend the first 45 minutes watching these four do absolutely nothing: walking through the carnival, giggling at strippers in the freak tent, and talking like they’re auditioning for a regional toothpaste commercial. Hooper clearly wants to soak in the sleaze of the carnival—the kind of place where every ride feels like it’s held together by rust and broken dreams—but it just feels like filler. Everything is bathed in red light and fog, which would be creepy if the movie had a pulse. Instead, it’s like watching an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by David Lynch’s sleep-deprived cousin.
And then there’s the creature.
Oh, lord.
The “monster” is a mutated carnie named Gunther, who spends most of the movie in a rubber Frankenstein mask before finally revealing his real face—something that looks like a melted bath toy with mange. He grunts, he drools, and he murders people with the same enthusiasm you’d expect from a man assembling IKEA furniture with no instructions. He’s not menacing. He’s just gross. Not in a disturbing, Body Horror way, but in a “why does his face look like mashed potatoes sneezing?” kind of way.
To make things worse, the movie actually tries to give this creature a backstory. Turns out he’s the son of the carnival barker, and his father covers up his murders with all the finesse of a used car salesman hiding bloodstains. They have weird family tension, which could be interesting if it wasn’t delivered in gravelly whispers and long, boring monologues. Imagine Of Mice and Men if Lenny had tentacles and a trust fund of trauma.
The kills are staggeringly unremarkable. People get strangled, stabbed, electrocuted, but it all happens with the visual intensity of a PBS gardening show. There’s no sense of shock, no build-up—just a limp cut to someone screaming and falling over. Even the big death scenes feel like they’re happening in slow motion, and not for effect—just because nobody involved could muster the energy to shout “Action!” louder than a whisper.
Now, to be fair, the production design is halfway decent. The carnival is filled with gnarly mannequins, rusty gears, and grotesque animatronics that would absolutely fail every safety inspection known to man. But good set design can only carry a film so far—especially when your monster looks like he smells like boiled Spam and every scare lands with the weight of a feather on a corpse.
The soundtrack? A sad, whimpering attempt at carnival horror music. It squeals and whines like a calliope being strangled by a theremin. The score wants to say, “You’re trapped in a nightmare funhouse,” but it ends up saying, “The saxophone player has passed out in the popcorn machine again.”
And then there’s the pacing. You could trim 30 minutes out of this film and still have plenty of time to show Gunther slobbering on a victim and Amy crying in a corner. Scenes stretch on endlessly. Every corridor looks the same. Every footstep echoes like a bad decision. By the time the climax rolls around—an awkward, drawn-out sequence involving a conveyor belt and the monster’s final, ridiculous demise—you’ll have emotionally checked out, possibly started reading about better movies on your phone, or maybe even just walked out and joined the carnival.
Final Verdict:
The Funhouse is a disappointment wrapped in fog and dipped in lukewarm greasepaint. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not scary. It’s not even fun. Tobe Hooper once gave us leather-wearing cannibals with chainsaws. Here, he gives us a big, sticky man in rubber pants hissing like a broken humidifier.
Watch it only if:
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You’ve run out of Goosebumps episodes.
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You’re locked in a real funhouse and this is the only thing playing.
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You want to teach a class on how not to pace a horror movie.
Everyone else? Step right up, walk right past, and never look back. Because once you’ve entered The Funhouse, the only thing you’ll want is a refund—and maybe a tetanus shot.
