3MR

The Funhouse (1981)

jprutter movies, reviews , , ,

the-funhouse-1981-everett

Another Tobe Hooper, this time from the early Eighties, and a mixed bag of testes: perhaps the start of his slide. The film starts with soon-to-be-last girl Amy (played by Amadeus actress Elizabeth Berridge) showering whilst a masked intruder (her younger brother) tries to stab her to death with a plastic knife. The homage to Psycho and pastiche of Carpenter’s Halloween is rather lazy and dated, and then there’s the creepy factor that a 10 year old is trying to peek at his sister’s soapy breasts.

Amy chastises the lad and then nicks off to the local fun fair with her jock date and stoner pals for a night shagging in the funhouse, owned by a redneck and his deformed son who works as the ride’s assistant in a Frankenstein’s monster mask. The group overhear him receiving hand pleasure from the aged fortune-teller and his quick bolt-throwing sends him into a murderous rage. He chokes the poor woman and then tells his father, who helps him cover up the murder because “family needs to stick together”, something Hooper hammered home in his earlier Chain Saw Massacre in 1974.

It’s a predictable affair and there’s not much to enjoy except the abrupt ending. If the characters were as unhinged as those in Eaten Alive or TCSM perhaps it could have been elevated beyond bargain bin fodder.

3/10

Eaten Alive (1977)

jprutter movies, reviews , , , , ,

eaten_alive_1977_poster_01

Tobe Hooper’s follow-up feature after the deeply disturbing Texas Chain Saw Massacre was this blackly comic monster/slasher flick starring Neville Brand and a very young pre-Elm Street Robert Englund. Brand plays Judd, the proprietor of a run-down motel somewhere deep in the foggy Bayou, whose deep aversion to all things sexual has him feeding the patrons to his pet crocodile from Africa. What makes this film stand out from others is the eye-gouging EC Comic palette and abhorrent cast of characters that populate it. Think something along the lines of Lynch’s Wild At Heart, Jaws and Psycho thrown into a blender. Englund’s Buck character is as repugnant as any you’d find in a Tarantino, and there’s enough blood and relentless screaming to satisfy most gore freaks. A lost horror gem worth digging up.

9/10

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

jprutter movies, reviews , , , , ,

exorcist2_jp_poster

The Exorcist is rightly considered a peerless religious horror classic that still has the power to unsettle the most sceptical of viewers. In America, they take it much more seriously, and at a screening of the recut version in 2000, I sat with a spellbound and terrified audience which made for an electrifying cinema experience. John Boorman’s completely misguided sequel, even viewed unconnected to William Peter Blatty’s original, is like an embarrassing TV movie made by people with too much money. If it had been made in the Eighties, that money would have at least been snorted through a bill. Boorman didn’t know what to do with the source material or his cast. What’s left is an embarrassing mess best avoided. Go straight to Exorcist III, the superb and unfairly ignored follow-up.

2/10