Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Horror Films Where Nothing Much Happens for a Long While...

The Funhouse (1981)/Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things(1972)

These were originally two different reviews, but the films have the same general prognosis, and really should be placed together as a single review: so now they are.

I’m really running out of horror films now, I’m afraid. I have strong taste for horror cinema, in particular the horror cinema of the 80’s. 80’s metal like the first three Metallica albums and Celtic Frost do it for me these days, 80’s horror films also do, but the horror films are running a little thin when you get down to The Funhouse. The very same director that made this, Tobe Hopper, made one of my favorite film Lifeforce, that one from the mid 90’s where the vampire legends of old were inspired by creatures form outer space that come on Haley’s Comet and drain psychic energy. You want to know what a flaw is with the Funhouse. Sure, I like the part where the deformed carnival freak pays the gypsy fortune-teller a hundred dollars for a hand job, he has premature ejaculation, and chokes her to get his money back. There is a half an hour of four teenagers going to a carnival, smoking pot and hanging out before anything beyond vague foreshadowing going on. It takes more then an hour for the deformed freak to kill his first teenager hanging out in his funhouse. There is a naked girl in the shower first scene. The deformed freak is a pervert which helps a little bit. I’ve seen the face of the deformed monster from this one around, there is something iconic about it, but that doesn’t really make The Funhouse a good movie in and of itself. It even takes the deformed freak a whole long time to die in the death scene. I guess a director has minor or poor films and strong ones. This was not Tobe Hopper’s good film.
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Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things? People shouldn’t watch this movie.
The title has little to do with the film. This is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I’d think it very difficult to make a worse film. This is zombie movie where the zombies don’t show up until the last 20 minutes of the film. The rest of the film is this weird hippy theatre group screwing around on an island with a graveyard and an old cabin. Weird and authentically annoying theatre group leader gets his theatre troop to dig up corpses and perform satanic rituals. Basically, they screw around in the woods for some hour and ten minutes before the zombies start popping out of the dirt. That’s quite a build up. I’d be very surprised if you could find me a worse film then this one.
This film is not recommended on any level. It is too dull to have campy horror film value. It was a bad idea to make this film, although one that probably cost next to nothing to make.
WRETCHED. Zero stars. A new low even for a b-film.

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