October and Another Trip to the Funhouse

The Funhouse is, and always will be, an October mainstay. I just absolutely love the setting. God, it is so alley-cat and sewer-rat, with this pervading unpleasantness that reeks from it. I mean the carnival employees are quite a collection of uglies and grotesqueries. Kevin Conway’s talent is unquestionable as he does get to play three barkers, with one of them (the barker of the funhouse) standing out due to his being the father of a monster-faced serial killer of young girls (locals where the carnival stops).

 This ghoul is the product probably of incest but the mother is absent. The four teenagers being trapped in a funhouse after one of them thought it would be neat to do so is a rather half-hearted slasher trope that Hooper only uses so he can highlight the carnival ride itself. Hooper is at his best when he gets to spotlight the carnival, its employees, drunks, sleaze and bums (a “God will punish you!” bag lady included) that populate its environs, and the home environment of lead actress Elizabeth Berridge (three years before Amadeus) with a creepy kid (he puts on a mask, with a rubbery knife, surprising her as she bubbly-bathes naked in her shower!) brother she threatens to get with for his scare tactics, an alcoholic mother, and a father who seems oblivious to the wife’s boozy angst, worried that his daughter will be another victim “just like those two girls in Fairfield”. 

The four young adults are just your basic dope-smoking, “sex on the mind” teenagers wanting to have some fun out of the cautious eyes of their parents. The “night in the funhouse” idea was just a way to spend some time in a place to make out and get high. The carnival is a pit of undesirables that travels from one city or town to another to try and gather enough green to supply the mechanizations that operate and to function as a means to supply their habits or avarices. The fortunetelling *gypsy* offering to give junior with the Frankenstein Monster mask (a definite form of symbolism there) a bit of “bang for the buck” while our four teenagers listen on from a floor above in the funhouse…a hand job does the trick, but is all of it really worth 100 smackeroos? 

Anyway, the gypsy is strangled by junior, with pops finding her corpse (one of the carnival…killing one “of their own” is a sin; instead, Conway wished he would have killed a local girl instead!) and money missing…money stolen by one of the teenagers. A dropped lighter seals their fate and a teenage hunt/pursuit commences. This film, to me, is proof that with money and a decent crew at his disposal, Hooper could bring the style and effect needed for a fun horror show. The Rick Baker monster face for the killer and the body movements behind that face add a lot of color to the creature of the creature feature. 

This feels like a night at the carnival, with the funhouse objects bringing a lot of character to the entrapment of the teenagers. Hooper knows a good thing and exploits the various funhouse props that burst and heckle on cue to scare the shit out of the teenagers needing to find a way out. Conway’s ability to make your skin crawl (Hooper loves to use these characters built to get under your skin; two older men, one offering a ride to Berridge’s brother, another petting his face with a wash cloth lovingly, are presented as possible threats to a little boy who fled his house out a window so the parents couldn’t see him) is a huge asset to the film. The monster boy is basically an extension of his monstrous father. When we get a look at the twisting gears and mechanics of the funhouse and how it ultimately destroys the monster working it with his pops is a strong case of lost control caught in something totally operating as it should.