Alright, I know I said I would try to look for more legitimate obscure films, ones that would be genuinely interesting, but after seeing bits of this movie around, I just had to see it for myself. This is basically a horror-comedy, or at least an attempt at one, not unlike films such as Beetlejuice, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Leprechaun, with a jokey killer and wacky scenarios. However, it’s also an interesting case of ideas with no context, feeling as though they had all these concepts in mind but either never wrote or were never able to write a proper context around their ideas, thus leaving us with a series of odd scenes set around a loose premise. It’s a rather odd and hilarious viewing experience, but not really in the way that the filmmakers intended. Anyway, let’s get into what the film is about (roughly).
The film starts off with guys playing cards, one of whom is Christopher Lee, interestingly. Lee bets the spade-shaped key to his family mansion, which he ends up losing to another player whose winning hand contains a joker card (foreshadowing and motifing, how about that). He takes his family to the mansion, and while exploring they come across a game room with playing cards lining the walls and some sort of board in the center. The man spins a “win-lose” spinner on the board, which lands on lose and awakens the Funny Man, a warped-looking jester with a penchant for ironic killings and almost making one-liners. Meanwhile, the man’s brother is transporting the man’s things to the mansion in his van and picks up some hitchhikers along the way, including a Jamaican woman who looks like she’s right out of the 70s, a man who does a so-called “P.C. ” version of Punch and Judy, a pervy man who’s often reading a nudie mag, a guitar player who wants to be a rock star, and a woman with glasses dressed in an orange sweater and a skirt named “Thelma” (yeah, I think you see where this is going). Ultimately, the film cuts between the different characters going around the mansion and the Funny Man killing them all in appropriately ironic ways, for the most part (the Punch and Judy guy gets killed during a Punch and Judy show, the pervert is drawn into a strip-tease and then killed in the back alley behind the club, the wannabe Rockstar is literally gilded on-stage and becomes a golden statue, etc). Good luck trying to figure out why the Funny Man is doing what he’s doing, or even giving a shit about anyone in this movie either. As always, I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it doesn’t really give the film any greater meaningful context.
I do have to commend some of the film’s production and cinematographic elements. While it’s obviously not a high budget release, the film is much more competently made in that sense than one might expect, especially considering it was only made for about fifty-thousand pounds. The use of blue and yellow atmospheric lighting helps to give off that sort of “twisted camp horror” feel that they’re clearly shooting for, and the mansion makes for a nice, classic horror setting. Some of the shots in the film almost feel like something you’d see in an early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson film (e.g., Evil Dead, Braindead, etc.). Take the scene where the Funny Man kills the legally-distinct-from-Velma-Dinkley character: he shoots her brain out of her head and we cut to a head-on reverse tracking shot of the brain flying across the room with the eyes looking around, before then cutting to the brain landing in a basin and the lid closing on it, like a trash can. This is the sort of thing that tells you that the makers clearly wanted to bring a little more to this than would’ve been required and were clearly having fun with it, which I can respect.
However, as I said, the main issue with this movie is that it feels as though it wasn’t fully developed. There’s never really an explanation as to what the Funny Man is or why he’s doing what he’s doing. There isn’t even a moment where he claims to just be doing it for fun or something. He seems to be summoned by the spinning of a win-lose spinner, but why? Is the idea that it’s all part of some game? In one scene, we see him arranges photos of the victims in a way to imply that they’re playing cards to him, but there doesn’t seem to be a good enough explanation or connection to this idea to really give it any meaning. We do see the Joker card come up several times and playing cards do seem to be something of a motif, so the idea was clearly there, but something must have gotten lost along the way. In fact, I almost speculated that might be exactly what happened to this movie overall. I’ll run through a few examples of what I mean. In one section, we see that there’s a medieval village down a twisted ladder underneath the mansion (almost looking like something out of an early Tim Burton film), but we don’t really know why this village is here at all. I get the feeling that the original idea was that this was where the Funny Man resided when he was asleep, and perhaps he was cursed to inhabit this area (almost like a plane of existence) until he is summoned to play a game. Maybe he was an old court jester who took his jokes too far and was punished for it, or something of that nature. If it was, we don’t know because the film never tells us, and I don’t even want to get into the Jamaican lady injecting her hand with something that causes a cannon hole to grow between her fingers which allows her to fire blasts and fight the Funny Man……….a possible reference to Jamaican folklore, maybe? Another big example is the underdevelopment of the characters. While we get to know the surface-level aspects of them, such as the wannabe rocker or the pervy dude, we don’t really spend enough time with each character to really get to know them, so we don’t really care if they live or die. The film seems more interested in getting to the ironic killings as soon as possible, and it probably doesn’t help that there’s a good number of characters here too, so less time is going to be dedicated to them individually. It basically kills whatever connection we might have had with the film and turns it into a series of oddball scenes where we watch these characters die. In general, it just feels like they had the bones of the film but not the connecting tissue, or something to that effect.
I also want to note before we wrap up that the Funny Man himself wasn’t really all that funny, or at least not consistently. It definitely seems like they were trying to play him as a Freddy-Krueger-type, a twisted supernatural killer who makes jokes or puns about his killings, but he doesn’t get that many funny lines to say and there are plenty of moments where it almost seems like he’s going to quip, but then he just….doesn’t. Couple that with the almost drawn out nature of some of his bits, and I get the impression that they might’ve just let the actor do whatever he wanted without much direction, a method that can either produce genuine hilarity or a sort of awkward hilarity (guess which one it usually was).
Overall, this film is a classic example of something that wasn’t thought through enough before it was pushed into production. There are interesting elements on a technical perspective, and some ideas that might have been effective in better hands, but ultimately it just amounts to a series of odd events. I suppose if you enjoy some of the films, I compared it to, such as Killer Klowns, then you might want to check this out for the hell of it, but I’d more so recommend it if you just want to have a weird film trip that makes you go “what were they even trying to do here?” Perhaps the Man will be funnier to you than he was to me.