The Funhouse (1981)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) At long last, it finally comes together. Twenty years ago, I read a Dean Koontz book called The Funhouse, and now that I’ve seen the film, I can track how Koontz’s novelization, published before the film came out, remains almost more famous as a Koontz novel than a movie tie-in. While the film is helmed by horror legend Tobe Hooper in a style somewhat reminiscent to his earlier Texas Chainsaw Massacre (most notably the reuse of deformity in deep-America horror context, or am I jumbling the Chainsaw Massacre sequels together?) that makes the result a cut above the usual slasher films of the era, by modern standard it’s a humdrum horror film that sticks close to the codes of the genre. The monster-in-a-fair motif is familiar, and not even a better-than-average execution can quite make it shine. What I remember of the novel is substantially more detailed than the film — a surprisingly common occurrence once real genre writers get to work on a novelization (Also see: Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage and Card’s The Abyss). As for The Funhouse itself, it’s just interesting enough to be worth a watch today if you’re a horror fan (something that’s not necessarily true of the glut of horror films in the early 1980s), and a slightly better-than-median entry in the Hooper filmography. Otherwise, though, there isn’t anything spectacular to see here.