Clowns, Carnies & Carnage: A Funhouse Fiasco

Step right up, folks! This week we’re diving headfirst into the greasy, blood-soaked world of carnival horror with a triple feature of chaotic fun: the classic 1981 slasher The Funhouse, its unhinged 2015 follow-up The Funhouse Massacre, and the wild 1973 oddity Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. Expect murderous clowns, distorting mirrors, questionable carnival food, and enough red herrings to fill a midway.

Whether you’re here for the practical effects, the body count, or just to laugh at how many bad decisions these characters make, this episode is pure chaotic carnival carnage. Grab your ticket… if you dare.

Transcript

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Welcome to Dad Bot of Horror. I'm your host, Butch Barr, still no co-host. Welcome to uh season one, episode 27. Yeah, 27. Look at that. And uh this is actually the third time I'm recording this episode. Sometimes the app that I use, Riverside, just kicks my ass. So yeah, I'm not very happy about having to do this for the third time, but uh I am doing it for the third time. And it's you know, it's like I wish I had the money like the Kelsey brothers, because I mean, obviously, someone's doing the technical stuff for them. I I'm not saying they're dumb or anything, but they're not dealing with the technical crap, they really aren't. And I wish someone else would be dealing with it for me too, but it is what it is. So let's get some house cleaning out of the way here. As always, um, you can find me on Twitter or X at Dad Bot of Horror. I'm also on Instagram at dadbot of horror. Don't be afraid to follow me, but be afraid if I follow back. And once again, I'm gonna tell SQL to support independent horror movies. Again, you can do this through crowdfunding crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Seed and Spark, WeFunder. There's a whole bunch out there. Start Engine. Uh, Start Engine's kind of bigger, they don't usually do individual films, but just Google crowdfunding, and there's a crap ton of sites anymore. And again, you could also watch independent horror movies on Tubi, Pluto, Plex, you know, free streaming platforms like that. And as you watch commercials or as commercials play, money goes towards the producers. So I would suggest doing that. I do both. I did see a movie since the last episode. The movie is called Spandexorcist. It is about Exorcist and Spandex, yes. That is uh the that's why the title. Um, it is on Fawsom, another free streaming service. This is a uh low budget movie, and I did support it on one of the crowdfunding, probably Kickstarter, maybe Indiegogo. Anyway, I did support it. You can see my picture in the beginning, and also my name in the credits in the beginning and at the end of the movie. So what I hoped for Spandex when I I donated money to it, and what I got were two different things. I always got to remember to set my sites a little bit lower because you know there's a big difference when you have you know $10 million to do something versus you know a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars to do something. So, you know, for for what it was for what it is, it's not a bad movie. There's a lot of filler in it. Um, I would give it a four out of ten. So I've seen much worse movies than this one. So now we'll move into movie number one for season one, episode 27. I do like to say that over and over again. The movie's called The Fun House, it's from 1981. Um, you can rent or buy it on Prime. A production company Universal Pictures and Mace Newfield Productions. The director, Toby Hooper. I think it's Toby. I I think I looked it up last time and it was Toby, even though it's spelled T-O-P-E, which is like Tobe. But I think it's Toby Hooper. Writer Lawrence J. Block stars Elizabeth Barridge, Sean Carson, and Gene Austen. The plot, teenage Amy Harper, her boyfriend Buzz Dawson, and their friends Richie Atterberry and Liz Duncan visit a local carnival for a night of innocent amusement, but soon witness a fortune teller's murd murder and find that the exits are locked. Kind of. Except for the end, that's pretty good. Just a side here. So I found a script that I wrote many years ago. And uh just these names Amy Harper, Buzz Dawson, Richard Addenberry, Liz Duncan. Like names are the hardest thing to come up with. I I don't know why. Um, but anyway. So why this movie? Uh, next week is my hometown's annual carnival. Uh and uh I've worked at concession stand there for quite a few years, so I just thought we'd do something with a uh with a uh carnival theme, you know, horror movie killing carnivals. So yeah. How did I see this one? Well, I've actually seen this movie quite a few times. Um, I'm pretty sure I watched it with my sister Tiffany for the first time, and I'm pretty sure it was on HBO. Only because I think I remember seeing it a lot all at once. And uh HBO, you know, I realize you have this like the streaming service now where you know it's basically pick, it's like every other one, pick the movie or TV show you want to watch. But back in the day when I was a kid, you know, it was a schedule, just like you know, NBC or CBS, it was a schedule. So every day, you know, you'd have there was a list of movies or shows that were gonna be on, and you had to watch it at that time. If you if the movie was on at two o'clock, you had to watch it at two o'clock. You had to sit your butt down at two o'clock to watch the movie. And you had a guide that would come, you get it every month, and it would show, you know, every day of the month and every time and what was gonna be shown. And yeah, these kids are spoiled today, just pick what they want to watch when they want to watch it. Really spoiled. We just have to sit around and wait, or you know, stop what we're doing. Hurry up, we gotta go over here and watch it, or or try to catch it because of course the movie was on multiple times during the month. So you just have to catch it at some other time or find a time that worked best for you. But I also remember getting those like HBO guides when they came and how exciting it was, because it was like, oh my gosh, what movies are gonna be, you know, what movies are gonna be on HBO next month? Oh my gosh, I can't wait to watch this, blah blah blah. Oh my gosh, yeah, so exciting. And you know, the the schedule was set for like you know, usually on the hour or half hour, like basically for the most part, on the hour and half hour. So if the movie went an hour and 35 minutes, then they had like 25 minutes of filler, and some of the filler was was pretty fun too. I I I know the opening of the movies on that were on HBO, they had this really cool like camera going down through a street shot, and it was really it was really neat, and they showed the behind the scenes of that, which is really neat too, anyway. So, yes, I probably watched this on HBO. My favorite kill, I guess, was the second kill in the movie. So, as it says earlier, these kids they witness the murder of the fortune teller. Well, so the fortune teller is killed by this deformed guy named Gunther, and uh they're down in this room, and Gunther kills the woman, and they're up above him in I don't know, the rafters. I don't know. For some reason, there's this big space above, like a lot of the attractions at this particular carnival. So they witness this, and uh Gunther's dad, who's the guy that runs the carnival, uh, figures out, finds out that they're up there, and uh, so now he's trying to get them to silence them. So they're running around up in the rafters, and then all of a sudden they're near this trapdoor, and the trapdoor pops open, and a skeleton comes out of the floor and keeps like going up into the up higher, and a rope that is around the skeleton wraps itself somehow around uh Richie Atterberry's neck and pulls him up and ends up hanging him. I think I like it because it's just really silly. Everything that happened there was silly. Um, like there's nothing about anyone in this movie that thinks that would make you think they have some kind of power to be able to do that. So, yeah. So the beginning of this movie is excuse me, very much like a mix of Halloween and psycho. So it starts with this point of view shot, very much like Halloween, the point of view shot, person walking into the house, well, walking in the house, and then the person picks up a clown-like mask and puts over their face again, very much like Halloween, and now you have your point of view shot going through the mask, like Halloween. Then the killer grabs a knife again, like Halloween, and then goes into the bathroom where his sister is showering, pulls open the shower curtain and starts stabbing at his sister, which is a mix of Halloween, because at Halloween he does stab his sister with a knife. She's not in the shower or anything, but she's naked. And in here, the of course the girl is showering naked because most people do shower naked, so he's stabbing and does stab, and it's a fake knife. So basically, this kid just put on this thing, went to stab, and basically see his sister naked in the shower, which is kind of weird. The kid, I think they try to tell you he's kind of on the spectrum somewhere. I don't think it comes across real well, but I think that's the idea that he's you know, there's something different. Let's say different. So, but it nothing ever comes from it. It it is it's just is so, and again, the stabbing in the shower going back is very butt psycho. Um, it's the thing most people remember from that movie. So this movie's kind of weird, but it's good. Um you know, the idea of this traveling carnival, and like the carnival isn't bad. The people in the carnival aren't bad, it's just Gunther. So, you know, the carnival itself is interesting. The carnival owner has a son, this Gunther guy, who is deformed and probably on the spectrum somewhere too. And Gunther walks around and helps at the carnival, and he wears a mask and gloves so that people can't see his face. I mean, he is really deformed, like really, really strange. So Gunther ends up killing this woman, and the teenagers here see see the whole thing, and now they're trying to get out of the carnival. And again, Carnival owner and Gunther are the only ones like hunting them down. It's not like this this carnival just goes around killing things. Gunther accidentally, probably accidentally killed this woman, and now the his father is just trying to protect him, and I'm sure the carnival. I shouldn't say, I don't know if it's a backstory, but they they had scenes, I think, of the previous carnival where Gunther like tries to get women to be with him in a sexual manner and then he kills them. But they cut, I guess they cut a lot of that out of the story. But anyway, her parents warn her excuse me, not to go. And being the good final girl, virgin, you know, goody-goody, she tries to talk her boyfriend, Buzz Dawson, out of taking her to this carnival, but Buzz wants to go to the carnival, and well, Buzz dies. So he kind of got what he asked for. While I was watching this movie, I was you know, trying to think back to you know, Cabin of the Woods and the archetypes, archetypes, archetypes, arch arc, however you pronounce that word, archetypes. I think I looked this up before and I forget. I'm gonna say archetypes fit for this movie. So the first woman killed, the fortune teller, she was being paid to perform a sexual act on Gunther. So I guess you could say she was the tramp, the uh promiscuous one, the slut, whatever you want to say. And three other people were killed before we get to the final girl. So the first one, Richie, he was absolutely the fool, and there's no doubt in that. And then Buzz Dawson, he got killed. And I guess you could say Buzz was probably the jock, the athlete, the warrior, however, you want to look at that, because he was, I don't know if they ever got into him being an athlete or anything, but he was a bigger dude, you know, muscular and everything like that. So I could see him being the let's say the jock. And then that would leave Liz uh Duncan, the other girl, to be the scholar. They don't get into it, but she could have been. Like, there was nothing about her that made you think actually that she was any different than the final girl. I don't think she was slutty or anything like that, but there was nothing appointed to her being a scholar, but I'm gonna go with it. Because then we'll have the final girl who was the final girl. So it all makes sense. So Rick Baker, who I'm not sure I talked about yet. I don't know if we've done movies, a movie of his yet. So Rick Baker, he's a special effects like makeup guy that is incredible. Um, he created the creature of makeup for this movie, and he originally wanted to play Gunther, who effects he created. Um, but Toby Hooper and uh ended up uh hiring a mime instead because uh he liked the way the the movements of the mime. So I mentioned Toby Hooper, and I know I spoke about him before on one of my earlier podcasts when we were discussing Salem's Lot, which he directed, and then he directed this movie right after he did Salem's Lot. So there. And then uh the only one in the cast that has actually, I think, gone on and done anything else is Elizabeth Barridge, who played the final girl in this one. And she hasn't had like a bad career, like she's been in a bunch of stuff, she was never the star, but she certainly you know has had a half-decent career as a as a character actor, and and there's nothing wrong with that. So, movie number two for season one, episode 27, is The Funhouse Massacre. That's from 2015. You can find it, find it on Prime, Shout Factory TV, Fossum, Peacock, Plex, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, and Tubi Tubi. So basically any streaming service, it seems you can find it. The production company is Petri Entertainment. The director is Andy Palmer, the writers are Ben Begley and Renee Dorian, and it stars Jerry Burns, Scotty Thompson, and Matt Angel. So this is like supposed to maybe kind of be related to the funhouse. But just barely, maybe. So the plot six of the world's scariest psychopaths escape from a local asylum and proceed to unleash terror on the unsuspecting crowd of the Halloween funhouse, whose themed mazes are inspired by their various reigns of terror. So, again, why this movie? Carnival. Carnival theme. How did I seen it? I've actually seen this movie quite a few times because I really like I really like like movies, horror movies that take place at like carnivals and fear fests and stuff like that. I I think those are great. My favorite kill. So this movie's filled with some fun and some funny kills. I guess my favorite kill is there's a excuse me for for vulgarity if you're offended, but there's a chick fight in a bathroom. And uh the one of the girls, one of the girls gets killed. She gets forced back into the hook on a bathroom stall that you're supposed to put your coat on. Well, she gets that jammed through her throat and is killed that way. And I don't know, there's just something about it that I really enjoyed. I mean, a lot of the kills are fun in this because it uh people don't realize that the the kills are for real. So the the the the serial killers can kind of do what they want originally, and eventually, you know, people are starting to figure it out. So again, in the plot, these serial killers escape, and the escape was set up, and the person that helped them escape also manipulated the the uh the person, the owner, the person that was creating this a carnival fun house to set up the fun house to be related to those serial killers. So it was kind of you know, it was a very minor subplot thing, very minor, and it you could just miss that it was all intentional. It really could have you could you could have just missed that. So it's it's kind of you know, so these serial killers happen upon, well, they don't happen upon, but they go to this fun house and they each kind of go to their respective areas in the fun house and kill people, and and the people there don't know that it's not part of the act, which adds into the kind of fun of it, too. So this is a fun movie. It does get a little silly, um, but the acting and sometimes overacting really works for this movie. I mean, I think it was well written. I like I really do like everything about the movie. I don't know why it didn't do better. I mean, I think this is one that should be up there as um like a cult classic. I I think it is that good. So eventually a group of people figure out that they're real serial killers in this place. And you know, they're your heroes, they're the ones that they kind of build a story before this whole thing happens with them. So they decide to split up and try to stop these serial killers now that they know who they are, because for the most part, they're not you know imposing figures. So they figure, you know, they split up into twos and threes, and each are gonna take down one of the serial killers. And then after splitting up, um, someone asks them about the creepy clown dude. So the creepy clown dude is a huge ex-professional wrestler that is that is actually strong and like crushes people and breaks them and whatnot. And the guy replies after being asked that, he's like, Well, let's hope none of us runs into him, which was a great line at the time. I don't do it justice. If you watch a movie and see it in a movie, it is humorous. And of course, he's the one that runs into the creepy clown dudes. At the beginning of the film, Dahmer, Bundy, and Gacy are all mentioned. Uh, this is just before the film psychopaths are introduced as the cannibal, the lady killer, and the clown. Um, obviously, Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal, Ted Bundy killed women, and John Wayne Gacy used to enjoy dressing up as a clown, so it was kind of a nice little link there. One of the I mean, again, I really like this movie, but it also has an amazing cast. And sometimes in a movie, if you have an amazing cast, you can make a crappy movie good. So Robert England, who plays the warden of the asylum, from which the serial killers escape. Hopefully everybody remembers him from Freddie Krueger, and I've I've talked about him when I went over a night around Elm Street. You have Jerry Burns, who plays Mental Manny, who's kind of the uh I wish I could remember the guy, the the uh he was like a cult leader that got everybody to like drink poisonous Kool-Aid, so they all died, so they would board a spaceship to go to some other planet. And of course he didn't, because well, you know, that'd be silly. Uh he he played that kind of character, that was mental manny. Jerry is a terrific character actor, like he can do it all, he can play scary, like menacing, he can play funny. Um, sometimes he does it at the same time, which makes the menace even worse. I think he first gave Notoriety in the late 80s and early 90s, he was on a sitcom called Dear John. He was like a side character that you know started to steal the show. I think. I remember my parents watching that. He has well over 100 acting credits on IMDB. And I personally loved him on Angie Tribeca. Again, showing his comedy chops on that. Scotty Thompson, Scotty is a female. She plays the sheriff. I know that would throw off someone that I work with that her first name is Scotty. He would refer to her as a he. She's another great character actor, beautiful. She's been in a bunch of stuff. And I remember her as being Tony Denozo's fiancee on NCIS. There's Clint Howard, who plays the taxidermist. Clint has been around the block. He goes all the way back to the original Star Trek series. He was on one episode of that. Now he was a kid, but still. He was a child actor and is a continued actor still today. He's still an actor now. He still has movies coming out now. He currently has 265 acting credits on IMDB, which is, I mean, you can imagine quite a bit. Um, he's Ron Howard's brother, and he's just an amazing actor. I think the only thing that has ever held him back, and also at the same time helped him, is he's kind of a weird-looking dude. So, yeah. And it's a niche he fills. Courtney Gaines is also in this. He plays the guy that uh was the owner of the carnival. And hopefully you remember me discussing him when we were talking about Children of the Corn. He played Malachi, and again, another great character actor. I kicked myself because I had the opportunity to meet him and get his autograph at Monster Mania when we were there, but I just didn't wasn't patient enough. It's late at night. I have trouble. Now, the favorite guy that is in this is an actor called E. E. Bell. Another amazing character actor who has also been around the block. But you probably wouldn't remember him at all. He is just like the guy in the background. I love this guy. I was it was awesome to see he was actually like very prominent in this movie. The guy has 92 acting credits to his name, but I remember him best from the show, and probably first from the show, Married with Children. He was a member of Al Bundy's No Ma'am, which was the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood. And he was just one of the guys that was part of No Mam. You know, there might have been episodes, he wasn't in that many episodes, probably episodes he didn't even have a line, he was just in the background. But yeah, I just I'm again glad to see a guy like that who has absolutely paid his dues, like get a little bit more FaceTime and lines, and and and it was nice. The last two people I'll mention are Ben Begley and Renee Dorian, who were both writers on this project and also acted in the project. So the last movie, movie number three for season one, episode 27, is Malatesta's Carnival of Blood. There is something somewhere that is like something Malatesta. And I don't remember if it was a spell, if it was someone's name. It was in something else that I've seen more than once, but I have no idea what it is. And every time I say Malatesta, it's all I can think of. So Malatesta's Carnival of Blood from 1973. You can find it on Tubi, production company's Windmill Films. Director is Christopher Spiet, who never did another thing after this movie, and writer Werner Leipholt, or possibly Leipolt, who again didn't do anything else after this movie. It stars Janine Carrazo, Jerome Dempsey, and Daniel Dietrich. The plot, a family infiltrates a sinister carnival where their son mysteriously disappeared. I'm guessing that was a plot. If you can find a plot after watching this movie, you let me know what it was. Because it was just weird. Um, why this movie? Again, the carnival is a carnival. How did I see it? Um, I watched it for the first time for this episode. Favorite kill, I don't think I have one for this movie. So this movie is a prime example of some cheap, terrible horror movies that were made in the 70s. I personally think like early 70s and early 90s was just a bad time for horror films. For like the 70s, like it was all about like this shock value and like blood, terrible blood that looked like red paint. I mean, this was bad. In this movie, you don't have zombies, but you have ghouls who kind of act like zombies, like they eat people's flesh, but they don't turn them into other zombies. Um other ghouls. Of course, they don't know how ghouls are created, they don't get into that. You don't know why they're there, you don't know anything about any of that. The movie was weird, it was confusing. I don't know what the point of the whole thing was. It just kind of starts and then it goes and then it kind of ends. So, this will say probably everything you need to know about this particular movie. During its initial screening, the audience hated the movie so much that they blew the booed and threw items at the screen and walked out. Mortified by this response, the director and producer pulled all copies of the film and intentionally destroyed them. The film was considered completely lost for nearly 30 years. In the early 2000s, a surviving copy was discovered. Why? I mean, they should have just destroyed that surviving copy because I shouldn't say that there's no redeeming value in this entire movie, because there is one. The one redeeming value in this entire movie is that Herve Villechez is in it. Um, Hervey is a little person who gained fame for playing Tattoo on Fantasy Island. He is in this, it might be one of the first things he did. He does. He speaks a lot in it, actually. And again, he's a strange character, but the whole movie's strange, it's terrible. Have I seen worse? Yes. But yeah, this was just bad. So that's all I have for this episode. Uh, next episode, uh, the theme is going to be babysitters. So think about that. Babysitters. What movie could he possibly be doing for babysitters? And until then, again, if you like this episode, tell your friends. If you didn't like it, tell your enemies, and uh have fun.