"The Funhouse"(1981)d/Tobe Hooper

Like most genre enthusiasts, I fully recognize Tobe Hooper's crowning cinematic achievement, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as one of the greatest horror movies ever made.It's just the erratic shit he followed it up with that I've gotta take issue with.With TCM, he took a high and outside pitch and sent it deep into the upper decks for an uncontestable grand slam.His 1981 offering, The Funhouse, which was ravenously hyped by most horror zines of the day, is closer to a sputtering ground out back to the pitcher.I've noticed a lot of people out there seem to hold fond memories of this one, but it's a fucking mutt, plain and simple.I remember coming away from my first viewing feeling betrayed by all the advance press and leaked photos of Rick Baker's special extreme cleft deformity makeup, having just endured a lethargic, scareless, and mostly bloodless turd.After a few pay-cable viewings and a half-hearted vhs rental in the eighties, I buried the lackluster experience in the darkest recesses of my mind until the technological breakthrough of dvds forced me to re-examine the damned thing, hoping I was overly critical towards it, or perhaps a different cut of the film would change my mind.An emphatic "Cazzo no!" would be the case.On the positive side of the coin, Hooper provides some decent old fashioned atmosphere and suspense in a classic carnival setting dressed with creepy vintage animatronic figures and surreal lighting that's reminiscent of Argento in spots.On the other hand, the cast leaves me pretty flat, apart from perhaps Sylvia Miles and Kevin Conway, as a skeevy fortune teller and sideshow/funhouse/stripshow barker, respectively.Also, the story, as novelized from the screenplay by horror fiction icon Dean Koontz under the pseudonym Owen West, takes something like eight and a half hours to finally kick into high gear, and once it does, it leaves me thinking there ought to have been more.More scares, more gore, more of a body count, more focus on Baker's makeups...but there isn't.

I'm suddenly compelled to whip myself up a pair of fried eggs for some reason...
After Amy Harper(Elizabeth Berridge) gets her titties rubber knifed in the shower by her prank-loving brother Joey(Shawn Carson), she not only renegs on taking him to the carnival(you know, the one where two little girls' dead bodies turned up at last year...) on Saturday, but also vows to exact memorable revenge upon his gruesome little ass for his mischief, before venturing out on a first date with a grease monkey named Buzz(Cooper Huckabee) who can't even pick her up at a decent hour, ferchrissakes.They pick up Liz and Richie(Largo Woodruff, Miles Chapin) and pass around a quick jibber, as Joey climbs out of his bedroom window, determined not to miss the carnival and a perfect opportunity to spy on his older sibling.Buzz wins Amy a stuffed animal and explains his unfunny dancing duck joke to her at the top of the ferris wheel.Amy discusses her troublesome virginity with Liz in the bathroom, when they're interrupted by a over-zealous bag lady(!) who reminds them that God is watching them.Joey gets a ride proposition from a toothy creep who points a shotgun at him.Meanwhile, inside the sideshow, Buzz marvels at a lip-licking cow with a cleft palate and another with a parasitic twin growing out of its face, no doubt, two of the 'eighteen worst mistakes that God ever visited upon man', this movie excluded.Before leaving, Richie drags the double date into a separate tent that contains a mutated baby floating in a lighted jar that momentarily puts a damper on their cannabis-based hijinks.The funhouse barker(Kevin Conway) puts a chill up Amy's spine with his monologue before the group ducks into the magician's tent, as Joey finally makes the scene, dumping a sack of change at the ticket booth.After smoking another discreet pinner(these kids know how to party) behind the tent, the group decides to check out the hooch-slugging fortune teller, Madame Zena(Sylvia Miles), who tells Amy a tall, dark stranger will enter her life amidst her friends' pot-induced giggles("Don't come back or I'll break every fuckin' bone in your body!", she later warns).Richie suggests that both couples stay at the carnival after closing, spending the night in the funhouse.Probably not a good idea, dude.

"Ewwwww, Rasputin's penis!I'll give you a buck if you take it outta the jar and tug it like a bell rope!"
Joey watches as the funhouse cars that contained his sister and her friends return to the mute operator in a Frankenstein mask outside without the prior passengers inside as the carnival shuts down for the evening.The couples notice gaps in the funhouse floorboards that reveal an office below, where the wheezing mute in the Frankenstein mask has solicited Zena(100 bucks for Sylvia Miles?C'monnnn.) for sex.While Zena administers a handy to kick off the action, Frankie prematurely pops his cookies, and when Zena refuses to refund him his money, she gets choked the fuck out for her thriftiness.While the gang beats a hasty retreat for the (locked, of course)exit, Richie jacks all the samoleans outta the office cash box, earning the masked mutant a hearty beating at his own hands(!), to the glee of his barker/father("You really did it this time, didn't ya?!You killed one of the family!"), until he rips off the latex to reveal a severely deformed, blood-curdling cleft-grill and red eyes.Richie carelessly drops a cigarette lighter through the spaces in the floorboards, alerting the carnage-crazy carnys to the intruders upstairs.At this point there's a whole lotta walking around in the dark, until finally the funhouse power is turned on suddenly, as the barker tries to goad his misshapen son into doing one last bad thing for him so they can bury the bodies and go fishin', like they used to.Richie gets lassoed with a noose and hung in front of his panicked pals as the surrounding props once again come to life, the stolen money floating down around them like so much confetti.Buzz blindly swings an axe down into an oncoming ride car, only to discover his blade planted in Richie's dome instead, with Liz hysterically chasing afterwards and falling through a trap door in the floor, later to be killed off-camera when she plants a dagger in the monster's back.After dispatching the gun-wielding barker by skewering his hayseed ass on a sword, Buzz is, in turn, taken out by the murderous freak, leaving only Amy to fend for herself against it in the dark and foreboding funhouse.Just remember, it aint over until the mechanical fat lady sings, which, in this movie's case, probably should have been directly after the opening credits...

"Sorry, kid. You must be this hideously deformed to ride this ride."
Hooper was approached by no less than Steven Spielberg to direct his E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial(1982), but was too busy working on this movie at the time.He'd team up with the director a year later on the wildly popular Poltergeist(1982), though it's been argued that Hooper had precious little to do with the finished product, as Spielberg directed the actors, designed storyboards, and cast the movie on his own, but was unable to direct another movie while still immersed in E.T. due to a clause in his contract.In between all of that, he was also replaced in the director's chair(translation:quit) by Piers Haggard on the 1981 Oliver Reed/Klaus Kinski thriller, Venom.He would eventually direct Lifeforce in 1985.Berridge would go on to play Constanze Mozart in Amadeus(1984), while Huckabee, who'd scored genre roles in The Pom Pom Girls(1976) and The Curse(1987), has enjoyed a long career in television.On the scale, Funhouse gains a single Wop, not being very much fun at all.

"Hit yerself, you ugly thing!"

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre Pt. 2"(1986)d/Tobe Hooper

My junior year in high school had to be pretty uneventful, since I don't remember much of it.A lot of ball-busting during classes followed by a lot of post-date blue balls from dating underclassmen chicks from rival area schools, maybe.Yin and Yang of the high school universe, I guess.One thing I do remember was how amped up I was for the long awaited sequel to Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only intensified by the more I read and saw about it; Hooper was again in the director's chair(we all know how sequels usually go when that duty gets passed off to somebody else) with a budget, Dennis Hopper, a long-time fave of mine in front of the camera, the splatter was to be handled by none other than Tom Savini, my long-standing childhood horror hero of heroes, and Leatherface was gonna be mincing up yuppies, for which I'd never held back one iota of deep-seated repugnance.What could possibly be better'n that?As I walked out of the theater, I remember being highly disappointed with the experience; cheated by the censors out of most the magnificent gore I was looking forward to, loathing Dennis Hopper's Lefty character like he was onions personified on the big screen(I hate onions btw), and lastly, wondering where the fuck the mad brilliance that screamed its way off of every frame in the original was...
As the years passed though, I found myself warming up to the production more and more, finding little things that I dug, the excellent soundtrack featuring Lords of the New Church, The Cramps, and Oingo Boingo, and even appreciating the dark humor that Hooper emphasized over horror this time around.Did I mention the equally beautiful and talented Caroline Williams?The girl's got legs for days and a throaty southern twang that's just hot.Wop approves.Ultimately, after the theater, two VHS releases, and a bare bones dvd, I finally got what I was asking for when MGM issued a special "Gruesome" edition disc with deleted scenes in 2007.I can say now, without a shred of doubt, this is a cult classic, indeed.

Look out!That blood is gonna overstate your pastel sweater!
It's broadcasting as usual for radio dj, "Stretch" Brock(Caroline Williams) until two drunken yuppies who've been abusing their call-in priviledges play chicken with the wrong monster pickup on a bridge.Hiding behind his hitchiking brother's corpse, now a gruesome puppet, on the roof of the truck, is Leatherface(Bill Johnson), who ruins the boys' evening with his trusty revving chainsaw, the vicious murders all captured on tape at the radio station.After seeing one of his newspaper articles, Stretch reaches out to Lefty Enright(Dennis Hopper),the vengeful uncle of two missing persons from a decade earlier(Sally and Franklin Hardesty from the original movie) he believes to be victims of the mysterious chainsaw killings occurring across the state of Texas, and he suggests that she play the tape live on the air.Meanwhile, she covers a Texas-Oklahoma Chili Cookoff, which is won for the second year in a row by Drayton Sawyer(Jim Siedow), who staunchly refuses to name his secret ingredients with good reason.When she finally plays the tape on her show, she's startled to find Chop Top(Bill Moseley), a 'Nam vet with a metal plate in his skull and twin brother to the Hitchhiker, hiding in the shadows as she's about to shut the station down for the night.He's soon joined by Leatherface, who traps her behind the metal door of a storage closet as her co-worker L.G. returns, only to be viciously pummelled by a pun-spewing, tack hammer-wielding Chop Top.When Leatherface saws his way into the closet, Stretch charms the pants off of him, and after he yanks his wankie(blech), he destroys everything in his path with his signature buzzsaw, save for his new gal pal.Believing that Bubba has done the dj in, Chop Top and sibling drag L.G.'s battered body back to their digs:a massive abandoned carnival ground strewn with human remains and strings of colored lights.

Stretch(Caroline Williams)is clearly impressed by the size of Bubba's(Bill Johnson)weapon.
Stretch follows the killers to their home, finding herself trapped there only to be further wooed by Leatherface, who puts the freshly removed face of her still breathing bud, L.G. over hers(!), clumsily dancing with her amidst a bevvy of slaughtered bodies.Love is a many splendored thing.She's finally captured by the Sawyers, who sit her down to a home-cooked plate fulla insanity then bent over a bushel to get head-whacked by the greatest killer of them all, Grandpa(Does any of this sound familiar to you?).Meanwhile, elsewhere on the compound, Lefty, screaming for vengeance like Rob Halford after discovering a Dear Bruce letter in his dressing room, decked out with three chainsaws, stumbles upon the skeletal remains of his nephew Franklin, still in his wheelchair.He chainsaws through a wall, dropping in on the Sawyers' festivities, and when Drayton offers to pay him off, Lefty chainsaws him in the keester(!) and frees Stretch.A buzzsaw battle of epic proportions ensues between the former Texas Ranger and the unemployed cattle slaughterer in the human skin mask, with Bubba taking a Poulan to the labonza.Drayton sets off a grenade while hiding under a table, apparently snuffing everyone but Stretch and Chop Top with the explosion.The two end up in a carved out rock tower overlooking the entire property, where Chop Top repeatedly slashes her with a straight razor until she stumbled upon a makeshift shrine where a mummified Grandma is kept, holding a signature chainsaw, which Stretch uses to dispatch the plate-headed goon, who's just cut his own throat several times to show he means business(!!).As the smoke clears, we see Stretch atop the tower imitating the swinging, spinning chainsaw dance Leatherface ended the first movie with.

Compared to the average Monteforte family reunion, these chappies are positively lucid.
Two noteworthy scenes that ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor involve Leatherface chainsawing a crowd of boisterous football fans in a parking garage, and movie patrons in a theater, to the glee of Joe Bob Briggs, cult reviewer/personality extraordinaire, who gives a signature review("Saw Fu!") of Bubba's bloody handiwork and the end of the sequence.There was also a scrapped alternate plotline where Lefty turns out to be Stretch's father.A lot sillier than they were gory, it's still cool to be able to finally see what you've been missing all these years.Looking at the film through more experienced eyes, and taking it as the black comedy it was intended to be, TCM2 is pretty enjoyable overall.The cast is solid, with great performances by the original cook, Jim Siedow, cult vet Bill Moseley, Bill Johnson as a new Leatherface, and even Hopper's turn as Lefty isn't nearly as abrasive as I once thought it was.Oh, did I mention Caroline Williams? She also gives a stellar performance here.Savini is at the top of his game, with clever gore set pieces that are sparingly used in the final cut.On the scale, this often hilarious sequel to one of the greatest horror movies ever made merits three big ones, and a firm recommendation.Love it!

TCM without a demented dinner scene? Not on yer meat, you bitch hogs!

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"(1974)d/Tobe Hooper

If you ask horror aficionados which movie tops their list of the greatest of all-time,chances are,the vast majority will cite tonight's entry(OR one we'll be looking at sometime next month)as the granddaddy of 'em all.Few films can boast of capturing real,honest to goodness terror within their frames,but if any have ever done so,this one has.So effectively,it would seem,that former college professor and director of tonight's feature,Tobe Hooper,has never been able to live up to it,or escape from the shadow of it.Even Gunnar "Leatherface" Hansen learned early on,that taking a girl to see his exploits on the big screen probably isn't the world's greatest idea for a first date(Lamberto Bava's Demoni(1985) was always my movie of choice,as many of you women lucky enough to have dated me out there can attest).Loosely based on the handiwork of the "Butcher of Plainfield",Wisconsin's infamous serial killer,Ed Gein,and inspired by the growing brutality of the changing culture of the seventies and governmental falsehoods heaped upon the unsuspecting populace.It stood as the single most successful independent film ever made,until Halloween dethroned it four years later.
My first exposure to tonight's review dates back to the pre-rental days of video,when twenty bucks of my allowance was spent buying a grainy unlabeled bootleg out of the back of a black van in Edwardsville(no lie!),and upon being popped into my eight hundred dollar wood grain top loader,instantly became a regularly watched favorite of me and the boys,with deadpan imitations of Edwin Neal and Jim Siedow not an unusual sound around my house.I can't remember ever seeing broad daylight so effectively used to evoke harrowing feelings of terror the way Hooper does here.And when the sun goes down,well that's another story.The finale has got to be one of the most memorably maddening experiences ever committed to celluloid,drawing reserved reviews of praise from critics and moviegoers alike.With a brilliant pre-credit sequence delivered by John "Night Court" Larroquette(!) scrolling upwards,nothing could have prepared us for the most bizzare crimes in the annals of American history that were to follow...

The Hitchhiker(Edwin Neal) sure knows how to break the ice on awkward van rides,or head cheese,Polaroids,gun powder,straight razors,and you.
Sally(Burns)and her yappy invalid brother,Franklin(Partain),drive across the state of Texas on a sweltering summer day with Jerry(Allen Danziger),Kirk(William Vail),and Pam(McMinn) in a van to investigate recent news reports of grave robbery and corpse defilement in state cemeteries,and see if their grandfather's plot is among those that have been tampered with.On the way to a family property with a much needed swimming hole afterwards,the group stops to pick up a weird hitchhiker(Neal)along the road,who leeringly rambles about his family's history as slaughterhouse workers,the pros and cons of bolt gun steer execution,and his brother's head cheese,before taking Franklin's pocket knife and slicing his own palm open with it.He then takes a Polaroid of the fat chatterbox on wheels and demands five dollars for it.When Franklin declines to pay,the hitchhiker blows the picture up with a small pile of gun powder,and cuts Franklin's forearm with a straight razor before being forced out of the van,and giving half hearted chase,kicking the vehicle and giving the terrified youths raspberries.They stop at a gas station,where the proprietor(Siedow) tells them he's out of gas,then feeds them his own barbeque.They decide to drive ahead to the Hardesty property,returning to the gas station after the fuel truck makes its delivery.After arriving at the abandoned house and discovering the watering hole has dried up,Kirk and Pam decide to walk to a nearby house and ask the residents for gas.After disgusting his girlfriend with a human tooth he finds on the front porch,he goes inside,only to have the bejeezus clobbered out of his domepiece with a sledgehammer by a hulking retard in an apron,wearing a human skin mask.When Kirk doesn't return,Pam enters and stumbles into a room mobbed with piles of animal and human bones,some of which have been fashioned into garish,macabre furniture.As she tries to escape,she is chased down and dragged back inside by the lumbering murderer(Hansen),and slammed onto a meathook,where she is forced to watch as Leatherface perforates her dead boyfriend with a smoking chainsaw on a table in front of her disbelieving eyes.

Betcha didn't read this in your horoscope,Pam(Terri McMinn)!
As the sun begins to set upon the Hardesty house,Jerry sets out to find Kirk and Pam,who've never returned from their attempted swimming excursion.After finding their blanket outside,Jerry enters the neighboring house,only to discover a half dead,bluish Pam inside a freezer,before getting brained by Leatherface's mallet.As night descends on Sally and her brother,they take a lone flashlight into the thick brush in attempt to find their friends.As Franklin calls out their names,he's interrupted by Leatherface,who springs out of the blackness,bissecting him in his wheelchair with his revving chainsaw to the horror of his screaming sister.Sally runs from the squealing monster,unwittingly into the killer's house,and is greeted upstairs by the inert remains of an elderly couple propped up in easy chairs,before jumping out a second story window,and running the entire distance to the gas station they'd visited earlier,with Leatherface close behind.The cook reassures the hysterical girl at first,but then clobbers her with a broom handle and hogties her in a sack,throwing his acquisition into his truck and driving off into the night.Outside the house,he picks up the hitchhiker,and then chastises he and his younger brother,Leatherface,for what he's done to the door with his chainsaw(!).Inside,Sally comes to,to find herself in the middle of an ongoing nightmare,bound to a chair made of human bones,at a dinner table surrounded by bickering,hooting and hollering cannibals.Leatherface has donned a mask made of a girl's face,and appropriately applied makeup to it,before he and his brother fetch their elderly,vampiric grandfather(John Dugan) to kill the girl,as he was,afterall,the best killer there ever was.They hold the screaming captive's head over a metal apple barrel,but the ancient psychopath is too weak to wield the mallet,and drops it repeatedly.While they bicker back and forth,Sally manages to free herself and jump through a window.As she runs,the hitchhiker sweepingly slashes her with his straight razor,but unknowingly strolls into the path of an oncoming eighteen wheeler,which runs him over and kills him.Leatherface attacks the truck cab,but the driver throws a monkey wrench,hitting him in the head,buying Sally enough time to jump into the flatbed of a passing pick up truck.She giggles hysterically,in shock,as the sight of a furious Leatherface,angrily spinning swinging his chainsaw in circles in the middle of the highway,gets further and further away.

Leatherface(Gunnar Hansen) gives a Poulan-derived STFU to mouthy cripple,Franklin(Paul Partain).
Tonight's entry spawned several sequels,a terrible Michael Bay remake,and a subsequent prequel,none of which ever recaptured the greatness of the original(big surprise).Hooper followed it up with Eaten Alive(1977),Salem's Lot(1979),The Funhouse(1981),Poltergeist(1982),Lifeforce(1985),Invaders from Mars(1986),and the first sequel in 1986(all of which range from decent to excellent),before falling off big time.Burns,the lovely Pennyslvanian,played Linda Kasabian in the tele-picture Helter Skelter(1976),and genre fare like Hooper's Eaten Alive and Future Kill(1985).Neal has worked steadily ever since in films and television in everything from Power Rangers to Nick Palumbo's excellent Murder Set Pieces(2004),and is a real pisser to talk to.Hansen has also kept busy in mosty genre fare,with roles in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers(1985) and the aforementioned Murder Set Pieces on his impressive resume.You can find most of these rascals at horror conventions on a lucky weekend.We depart the classics for now and set our sights back on the familiar shores of mediocrity in July,with an occasional masterpieces thrown in for good measure,as usual.TCM stands as either number one or two of all-time,depending on my mood at the time of query,and for that impressive status,a perfect scale rating is bequeathed upon it,and a full recommendation from your(not so)humble N...

Sally(Marilyn Burns),up to her glutes in piles of animal and human bones,wonders where her hosts buy their curtains.