The Funhouse: A Buried Treasure

I just want to give all of you MB Blog readers a little update:
As of yesterday, August 4th, 2008 Jim and I went to Party Box in Lodi and there was a lovely woman stocking the shelves with none other than HALLOWEEN items! that's right! Pumpkins, bloody weapons, and skeletons as far as the eye can see!
Then, feeling lucky, we headed over to Party City on Route 17, and the main shelves were emptied out....in the corner in the back was the remaining pineapples, leis, tikkis, and other garbage from luaus far and wide...and....starting to make its way onto the main shelves? PUMPKIN LIGHT SETS!!!

Last year I had to wait until mid-August. But this year....August 4th. I'm with you party box/party city people. I'm with you.


Anyways onto the blog....

You see, this is why i love MonstersHD. If you didn't know...go back and read about it.

I was surfing good ol' channel 777 and stumbled upon a Tobe Hooper (a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist) gem called The Funhouse.

It's from 1981, so you know it's great/wretched. It was so good, in fact, that Tobe Hooper turned down some nobody guy named Steven Spielberg to direct this dud of a movie called E.T. to finish filming this instead.

First of all, The Funhouse has the most tag lines of any movie I've ever seen.
My personal fave is : Pay to Get In, Pray to Get Out!
But of course there are some that are a little more....verbose...like:
Something is alive in the funhouse... something that has the form of a human, but not in the face... something that feeds off the flesh and bone of young innocents...
and some that don't make any sense:
Something is alive in the funhouse... something better dead!
and then I guess they settled on one?:
Something is alive in the funhouse... something that, tonight, will turn the funhouse into a carnival of terror!
I've tried reading the 3rd one about 6 different times/ways and it still doesn't make sense.

Stick with the Pay/Pray one...it's way better, Tobe.

Ok so I know you're probably on the edge of your seat to find out what this great movie is all about...I'm going to give you the first paragraph or so of the synopsis as written by Wikipedia.org. If this doesn't make you want to see it more than anything else in this world, I don't know what will:

Against her father's orders, Amy goes to a sleazy travelling carnival with her new boyfriend Buzz, her best friend Liz, and Liz's boyfriend Richie. Unbeknownst to the four teens, Amy's prank-happy little brother Joey (who happens to be obsessed with classic horror movies) sneaks out of the house and follows them to the carnival... which Amy's father was opposed to because a couple of Girl Scouts were found murdered at its previous location; no one knows who killed the two children or how, although both girls had to be identified via dental records.

At the carnival, the four youngsters smoke marijuana and sneak into a 21-and-over striptease joint. They heckle Madame Zena the Fortune Teller, visit a freaks-of-nature exhibit, and view a magic show.

I took the liberty in highlighting the parts that I found the most outrageous in red. I hope you don't mind.



Apparently, Dean Koontz wrote a novel from the screenplay but the book was released before the movie because production somehow took so long on this work of art.



Basically the movie has a deformed son of a carnie that is so tortured that he must kill. He can't help the way he is, poor thing.



I think you need to check this movie out, it's so ridiculous, it's astounding!