Funhouse (2019)
(On Cable TV, November 2021) As much as movie reviewers would like to claim that they approach every film fresh and on its own merits, that’s almost never the case. Sometimes you’re not feeling in a specific mood, and sometimes you’re fresh off a run of similar films that get you thirsting for something else. So it is that Funhouse is the fourth film in my 2021 “Blood in the Snow” (BITS) mini-festival, as facilitated by Super Channel. Alas, BITS specializes in low-budget Canadian productions, and that often means small casts, tiny budgets and consequently restrained productions. We’re literally talking about single-location shoots, less than a handful of characters and an intimate approach to small-scale topics. It’s often interesting… but after a few of those, you start thirsting for more. So while Funhouse is largely a single-location shoot, it does feature nearly a dozen characters and most crucially it goes well beyond its single location through stock footage, reaction shots and news reports meant to expand the scope of the story being told from inside a hidden bunker. The essential plot is not that original: In the past ten years, there have been many horror films about darknet snuff reality shows, so Funhouse doesn’t strike new ground when it brings together a bunch of reality-TV celebrities in a bunker for a violent last-person-standing web-broadcast. But its execution often compensates for familiarity in other areas: the script is rather good in its moment-to-moment execution, keeping us interested in what’s going to happen next and how the predictable rhythm of a show where people are killed every three days is going to be upset by the next plot development. It also helps, at least for male viewers, that the cast has been selected for attractiveness — Initially picking favourite characters on look alone (while waiting for the character development to kick in), I was pleasantly surprised to see Khamisa Wilsher and Amanda Howells have more to do than expected in the film’s third act. It’s also a great idea to regularly get out of the bunker for world-wide reaction shots, cable-TV reactions and stock footage expanding the universe of the story to a global perspective. Now, let’s be careful — I don’t think Funhouse is all that good. It’s overly gory, not quite as upsetting as it could have been in its depiction of people kept alive by popular approval (although there’s a predictable hidden factor here that makes this moot), a bit schematic in how it presents its characters and suffers from a dull coda that lands with a so-what thud. Writer-director Jason William Lee does well, but he could have done better. Still, compared to many other films of its class, Funhouse is more fun, more expansive, sexier, and more interesting to watch from one scene to the other. Obviously, I was coming to it with a specific mindset… but it felt good to break away from three-people-in-a-house movies with even something just slightly more ambitious.