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| Images courtesy of Arrow Media |
Cult British indie horror writer-director Simon Sprackling
first appeared in 1992 with his thirty-one-minute independent short film The
Funny Man starring Tim James as a supernatural demonic jester who
terrorizes and murders a group of kids who inherit a house recently won over a
poker game. A typical horror slasher
with a British comedy streak running through it, largely because of the central
Funny Man horror icon himself, the short film like many before it paved
the way for what would or wouldn’t become a pitch for a feature length
effort. Featuring Christopher Lee in a glorified
cameo near the beginning of the film, the microbudget $1 million comedy-horror
flick Funny Man emerged on the silver screen two years following the
release of the short film. While the
film never quite amassed the following which, say, other comedy horror icons
like Freddy Krueger enjoyed, it still comes about among cult horror cinephiles
who like a bit of levity with their slayings.
After Max Taylor (Benny Young) beats poker master Callum
Chance (Christopher Lee) at his own game, he wins the deed to the player’s
ancestral home. Despite Chance’s
warnings of danger lying ahead for those who enter that house, Taylor and his family
moves in together. Shortly after
settling in, Taylor makes the boneheaded decision to spin a wheel of chance
which like a Ouija board summons a demonic jester who calls himself the Funny
Man (Tim James). From here, member by
member, the Funny Man joker does away with each of them in increasingly innovatively
grisly ways. Breaking the fourth wall
every time with the Funny Man looking directly into the camera and speaking to
the audience, it becomes something of a screwball horror comedy with plentiful
gore and creative slayings while the Funny Man drops one-liners. Sooner or later, the poker winner’s brother
Johnny (Matthew Devitt) and a ragtag gang of hitchhikers join in on the household
pandemonium while the body count rises and the jokes continue to fly.
Originally intended as a serious-minded horror venture
before Tim James’ personality quirks helped steer the film and its
writer-director away from the script with steady reliance on improvisation and
supposedly made under the influence of hard drugs according to the director, Funny
Man is a bona-fide near-regional slice of British horror-comedy. As our titular demonic jester switches from
scenario to scenario, coming up with creative ways to kill off these cursed
kids, it takes on a Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare quality more concentrated
on cackles than screams. A literal clown-figure
in horror whose appearance spells fear but whose voice and demeanor spell
comedy, Funny Man is perhaps even more amusing for domestic viewership
but for Americans overseas it is a welcome antidote to the recent slew of try-hard
Pennywise from It: Chapter One so determined to “scare” you it becomes
stale self-parody.
Bizarre, slapstick and more than a little tongue-in-cheek,
Simon Sprackling’s underrated little horror-comedy gem though maybe
underutilizing the great Christopher Lee nevertheless ushers in Tim James as an
offbeat horror icon. Like the character
of Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice whose quirky mixture of grotesque makeup
effects and cartoony slapstick pushes Funny Man further away from
Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees and closer to patently absurdist hilarity. Still a cult item flying under the radars of
many, Funny Man isn’t particularly scary but it is undeniably a lot of
weird goofy fun with a villain we find ourselves rooting for and hoping for
more antics from down the road. One of
the more underrated faces of distinctly British horror-comedy ripe for a
beer-and-pizza night at the movies.
--Andrew Kotwicki
