Movie: "Funny Man"
Year: 1994
Rated: R
Genre: Horror
Directed by: Simon Sprackling
Writing credits: Simon Sprackling

Reviewer: Protoclown
Posted: 9/22/2008

Plot: Christopher Lee bets his mansion in a poker game and loses it; random moronic people get killed by a maniacal jester inside it for no reason.

Review: Back before Tower Records went to shit and closed all but a couple of their stores, my friends and I used to go in there fairly regularly and rent all kinds of crazy movies that you just couldn't find in other video stores. For weeks I had noticed "Funny Man", with a picture of a demonic, wicked looking jester on the cover with the tagline "Half Jester, Half Demon!" (this was back in the days of VHS, the DVD box shown here is different), and I thought "How could you possibly go wrong with this?" Oh, if only I knew.

After several weeks, I finally convinced my friends that we had to rent this, and they relented, having found nothing else they deemed worth watching. I still think in some ways they've never forgiven me for this.

Upon popping the movie into my friend's VCR, we realized that the movie was British, which I thought was great, because I love British comedies, and given that this had all the appearances of a horror-comedy, I thought we'd be in for a great ride. Oh, how wrong I was. With Christopher Lee appearing in the very beginning of the film (and you know it's a bad sign when the guy who gets top billing on the cover is only in the movie for less than five minutes), you might think that'd be a sure sign of the quality to come, until you remember that Mr. Lee has been in some truly awful movies (and a man who's been in as many movies as him is bound to).

The first problem was that most of the dialog, particularly from Funny Man himself was almost impossible to decipher to my American ears. His thick accent along with his mumbly way of speaking left me clueless as to what he was saying a good 75% of the time (and remember, as this was VHS we didn't have a subtitles option). I watch a lot of British stuff, I'm quite fond of British stuff, and normally I have no problem understanding it. Not the case here.

This twisted Jester ran around the house and killed people in "ironic" ways befitting their personalities, for whatever reason--I can't even remember why. And he kept making these snarky Freddy Kruegeresque quips directly to the camera, but they always fell completely flat because they were either a) impossible for me to understand or b) painfully unfunny. And yet my friends and I watched the whole thing, in stunned and disappointed silence. This isn't even one of those bad horror movies we could make fun of while watching. It was just absolutely painful. This film came across like a talentless college student's project, only he couldn't summon up any decent ideas or anyone who could actually act (outside of Mr. Lee).

I will admit that it's been about 10 years since I've seen this, so a lot of the details are blissfully forgotten. It's possible that I would judge this film differently now that I'm older, but what little I do remember about it assures me that I will never subject myself to this vile piece of crap again. To any British fans of this movie, I'm sorry; normally I enjoy stuff from across the pond, but this was just terrible. My friends still to this day give me shit about it.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)