Review: Funhouse (2019)

Funhouse

Rating

Director

Jason William Lee

Screenplay

Jason William Lee, Henrik Santesson

Length

1h 46m

Starring

Valter Skarsgård, Khamisa Wilsher, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Karolina Benefield, Amanda Howells, Mathias Retamal, Dayleigh Nelson, Jerome Velinsky, Kylee Bush, Debs Howard, Bradley Duffy, Michael MacKinnon, David Peniuk, Ben Heidi, Scotty Scnurr Mac, Aron Olaf Johnson, Sean Scott

MPAA Rating

Unrated

Review

Better at home in the early days of reality TV, Funhouse tries to modernize the idea by throwing influencers into an elimination-style program streamed around the world.

Seldom seen Skarsgård brother Valker tries his hand at a genre that many prominent Hollywood actors (Brad Pitt, Patricia Arquette) found led them to success. His character, Kasper, is a washed up star whose messy relationship with a megawatt singer led to his eventual career as a social media influencer. Through his manager’s desperate act to get him a paid gig, Kasper ends up on a vainglorious reality program where he and seven other prominent but problematic stars will compete to see who can take home the grand prize while the others, they’ll soon find out, will die in the most gruesome ways possible.

By Saw standards, the ingenuity of the death traps is incredibly weak. They involve a baseball bat and an axe fight among other less than inspired torture devices. Plausibly these limitations were a result of a minuscule budget, but the testament of horror is its ability to create believable bloodlettings on the cheap.

Director Jason William Lee, who cowrote the screenplay with Henrik Santesson, shouldn’t expect a regular set of gigs in the industry with his facile directorial effort. Paint-by-numbers storytelling, bland shot composition, and tedious editing make the film feel longer than it is and that only highlights how thin the narrative is. The goal is to highlight just how pernicious and pervasive social media fame is and the deleterious effects it can have on the viewing public. The villain at the core of the piece, only seen on screen (to the contestants) with a cheesy panda avatar, wants to expose influencers as parasites and ends up becoming that which he condemns.

Few of the performances are above the standard for mediocre horror films. Skarsgård isn’t as engaging as he needs to be to anchor the story. Khamisa Wilsher does better at earning the audience’s sympathy as a influencer documenting her wedding preparations. As the love interest, her character is somewhat thin but Wilsher does fine establishing it. As the MMA champ Headstone, Christopher Gerard is almost as compelling a figure but his backstory is what makes him a winning figure, not so much his aggressive performance. The rest of the cast is unimpressive.

Funhouse is not a horror film that merits contemplation. Its limp moral and condescending tone make it feel preachy without being entertaining. With more inventive kills and more lively filmmaking, this premise could have been much more involving. Unfortunately, where it sits, it’s largely forgettable.