- Directed by Simon Sprackling
- Written by Simon Sprackling
- Stars Tim James, Christopher Lee, Benny Young
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
- Watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv_OBL1TPyY
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was completely stupid and utterly funny. We kept watching it thinking that this was awful and laughing out loud in humor at it. It’s very British, spoofy, cartoonish, violent, graphic, raunchy, and very weird. We sort of give it a thumbs up.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on a high-stakes poker game, and the men playing aren’t too happy with their hands. Max bets $50,000 on his hand, and the others fold except for Callum, the old man in the white suit, who puts up the key to his priceless ancestral home. It’s a $950,000 raise in the stakes. Max has the joker, so he wins. Callum Chance is creepy and makes a threat. Credits roll.
Max, his wife Tina, and their children go to their new mansion in the country. There’s a game room, and we hear Callum’s voice talking about a creepy game that Max has just begun. Elsewhere, John Taylor, a musician and Max’s brother, stops to pick up a hitchhiker on the way to London. He takes too long and ends up picking up four hikers in his bus (Did the Scooby-Doo gang’s van break down again?).
Max and Tina talk about Jammie and Harry having nightmares; she doesn’t like this old castle and wants to go home to L.A. Max agrees to go find a hotel once Johnny gets there. Meanwhile, little Harry looks at a court jester picture in the stained glass window, and we see something breaking up through the floor somewhere in the house.
Harry and the Funny Man play together. Tina walks into “The Love Gallery,” a room as weird as it sounds. The Funny Man comes up behind her, and she wonders what she’s been smoking. She backs out of the room slowly and then screams. She finds the room isn’t as easy to leave as she had hoped. He eventually beats her to death with a club.
Jammie plays GameBoy in a room, not seeing the Funny Man dancing around behind her. The Funny Man fries her with battery cables.
Max gets high and plays with a deck of cards that are all jokers.
Johnny shows up with his hitchhiking friends, and “The Psychic Commando,” one of the hitchers, senses something is wrong in the house. She does, however, release an ultrasonic scream that makes everyone cover their ears. She then shoots up with some kind of drug which annoys Johnny. The other three Scoobies want to go and leave her here, but Johnny says they can’t leave without her.
“Thelma” says psychic abilities are real before exploring the house to find Max’s family and the psychic woman. Fred and Shaggy take a walk and talk about how weird the whole situation is. Meanwhile, the Funny Man is outside peeing all over Johnny’s truck. The Funny Man plays soccer with someone’s severed head.
Somewhere in the house, Max finds a big pile of cocaine, pounds of it, and gets right down to business. It pops him right up to the chimney on the roof of the house and then for a real ride.
The Psychic Commando finds a nearly eternal stairway down, but eventually makes it to a small town (population 1) at the bottom of the steps. As she explores the Funny Man torments Thelma and literally blows her brain out.
Upstairs, “Fred” goes into Club Sexy, an obvious trap set by the Funny Man. Inside, the Funny Man does a whole skit about “psychedelic wigs” that make Fred boogie down and watch a porn show. This ends up going badly for him.
“Shaggy,”on the other hand, wanders through the catacombs and tunnels beneath the house until the Funny Man traps him halfway inside a wall and halfway in a puppet show that’s mind-blowing.
Through all this, Max continues to ride around the house in his drug-fueled shopping cart. Johnny wanders through the house looking for him, but eventually finds that his brother has sabotaged his career with the Rolling Stones. Max falls out a window to the little magical town below. Johnny then goes back inside to join the greatest rockers of all time, but it’s really just the Funny Man.
Down in the basement town, the psychic and Funny Man have a ridiculous gunfight; he uses pistols, and she’s got mutated hands that shoot fireballs. She runs him out of town, but he does end up getting the last laugh.
Johnny goes on stage with his guitar, and he hears cheering from all around. He’s in “Rock and Roll Heaven,” at least until the Funny Man shows up and literally makes him… a star.
With no one left, the Funny Man finds Max down in the burned-out little town. The Funny Man offers him his card… the joker. We see Callum Chance is a patient there, building houses from cards. Max, on the other hand, is not having as much fun.
Brian’s Commentary
“Duck!” “Where?”
Art the Clown from the “Terrifier” series would love the Funny Man. I wonder if Damien Leone took any influence from this. There’s even a bit of a resemblance between the two characters.
This was intended to be a full-on horror film, but Tim James’s character evolved during production, and as the filming progressed, they ignored the original script more and more. Supposedly, a lot of the crew were on drugs during the creation of the film, and yeah, it shows. As you might expect, it’s pretty disjointed and all over the place thematically.
Christopher Lee filmed his tiny role in a single day’s shooting. He probably had no idea what the rest of the film was going to be like. He’s in the first scene and then does a couple lines of off-screen narration throughout the film.
The four hitchhikers really were based on the Scooby gang, and the “Thelma” character is so obvious that it’s hard to miss the similarities.
The Funny Man’s mask and design is actually really good; I’m a little surprised that he didn’t get a whole franchise. Some of the characters have accents that are a little hard to follow (as an American viewer), but it’s easy enough to follow what’s going on. Actually, the sets and costumes are both vert low-budget looking but also completely appropriate to the story.
It’s objectively a terrible, terrible movie, but I laughed numerous times. If you’re into silly British comedy with a taste of horror, you might just love this. Maybe. You’ll need to come at this one from the “comedy” angle and not get too wrapped up in it being a horror movie.
Kevin’s Commentary
I wanted to hate this movie, but I kept laughing and enjoying it too much. It’s said that they started out making a serious movie but things went off the rails. Funny Man is foul and funny and keeps breaking the fourth wall. I had a good time watching this.