I have to say, I like Tobe Hooper in my own special way. His body of work is quirkier than most iconic franchises. One immediately thinks of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but someof his other movies, such as The Funhouse, based on the novel by Dean Koontz, have a similar format. If you see Tobe Hooper’s name, nine out of ten times, the movie is about teenagers stumbling upon a sketchy family of freaks protecting the one relative that just so happens to be a hideous monstrosity bent on knocking off these kids one by one.

The Funhouse tries to play on childhood fears of clowns in the opening credits. As the cast is read off, you see shot after shot of every type of grinning clown common at carnivals, which is where our story will take place.

The carnival has come to town, but our herione, Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) is forbidden to go. The year before, a murder was committed at the carnival, but *dun! dun! dun!* no body, or no murderer were ever found. Seen as this is a small town with little excitement, or anything better to do on a date, she doesn’t listen. Neither does her younger brother, Joey (Shawn Carson), who sneaks out the window after the parents retire for the evening. The stage is set.

Enter the cannon fodder. We have Amy, who you’ll soon realize is the virgin due to her discomfort at the joint passed around the car and being told by her friend, Liz (Largo Woodruff) to loosen up, lest she graduate a virgin. Liz, is the obvious blond party girl, making out with her rather geeky boyfriend, Richie (Miles Chapin) and smoking up in the car of Amy’s date, Buzz (Cooper Huckabee). Buzz is a greaser type who seems to want to get a little action, but is apologetic at his bad behavior once they get to the carnival.

What follows is your standard walk around the carnival, taking in some rides, winning cheap stuffed animals after spending a boatload of cash and some cotton candy with a freak show. Sounds like a typical double date, right? Problem there is the spooky old lady that screams “The Lord is watching you!” as Liz advises Amy on the art of seduction. A bloody faced man eyes the girls. There is a tent that serves as a strip club and a man with a limp and hunchback wearing a Frankenstein mask. He tends to the Funhouse ride, a simple cart on track concoction with knife wielding dummies and clowns, and eyes our Scooby gang as they enter the tent of freak animals, including a two headed cow.

Between you and me, if this were my carnival, even with my own morbid horror movie soaked mind, I’d want to leave. Our cannon fodder, I mean, meat, I mean, the teenagers decide what fun it would be to stay overnight in the Funhouse. Of course, when they agreed to this, they did not count on witnessing the murder of the fortune teller/prostitute at the hands of the Frankenstein masked man, who is horribly disfigured underneath the mask. They sure as hell did not count on the monster and his father finding out they witnessed this crime, trapping them in the funhouse, and stalking after them.

I have to say, I did enjoy this. However, there were just a few things this movie could have cut. For instance, Amy’s little brother, Joey, is just there to sneak out, get shot at by a guy trying to pick him up in his truck, find out the monster, but instead of helping his sister, he is brought home by one of the carnies. Now if this were my kid and I heard some slimy looking man say “I warshed him up real good,” I would call the cops immediately, thinking he was molested. Nope, they take him inside and don’t even ask about the sister. While on the tack of the brother, I honestly thought they would do more with his character. His room is a shrine to a serial killer. Monster posters are one thing, but there is wall to wall weapons and his first scene consists of a ripoff of the shower scene in ‘Psycho.’ I watched an episode of ‘Cold Case Files’ and the suspect was more or less convicted by the disturbing drawings and weapons in his room. I don’t what kind of parent would let that go, yet warn their teenage daughter not to go to a carnival due to the events of the year before.

There was potential for scare factor, mainly in the dysfunctional nature of the characters. The horrific events almost seemed plausible…Almost. It fell through on delivery and the viewer is left with a sense of “What just happened?”

Valentines day can be a rough one for anyone. Mustering up the courage to talk to that special someone can be nerve wracking as hell-especially when you know you haven’t a snowballs chance in hell. Conversely, turning down a suitor can be a pain enough. But for five beautiful young women bored with the dating and singles scene, that one shoot down can be deadly.

Just watching the opening scenes of this movie, it looked like it had potential. It was predictable, by all means, but it had a story, and a gimmick to possibly separate it from your standard slash em up and show some breasts flicks.

The film opens with a middle school Valentine’s Day dance. Now, with a bumbling and obviously ridiculed geek named Jeremy stammering his way up to the four prettiest girls in his class and asking one by one for a dance only to be shot down and insulted to the tune of “Eww-I’d rather have my throat cut” or how about “I’d rather be boiled alive.” Can you feel the setup? Jeremy, after being insulted by three of the girls and nicely turned down (“Maybe Later?”) by the most popular of the group makes his way to their overweight friend, Dorothy, sitting alone in the bleachers. That these two outcasts find each other, and end up making out under the bleacher suggests that not only are the chaperones not doing their jobs, but that there might be a happy ending. Because this is the opening scene of a slasher movie, the couple is caught by a group of boys who immediately start making fun of Dorothy. Dorothy, embarrassed, screams at Jeremy to get away from her. The boys, now thinking that Jeremy was trying to sexually assault Dorothy gang up on him, pants him and beat the crap out of him. The viewer is treated to a close up of one of the kids wearing a cherub mask instead of the teachers that should have stopped the fight before it started.

With potential for revenge realized, we cut now to the present day where medical student Shelly (Katherine Heigl) is about to escape an insufferable date to do a little late night studying at a nearby morgue. She is alone (what is it about lack of supervision in this movie?) with a cadaver when a lone dark figure in a cherub mask appears. After a brief chase scene, Shelly decides to hide in a body bag, where she is found, and her throat is cut. Surprise surprise she told Jeremy years ago she would rather have her throat cut than dance with him.

As I said before, this movie clearly has a gimmick. For each horrific thing each girl would rather have done to her than dance with the school geek, a dark cherub masked figure makes it happens to her twofold, right? This would work, except one of the girls when asked to dance just screeches “EWWWWWW.” She is killed by an arrow shot into her heart in a poor ripoff of Kevin Bacon’s death scene in Friday the Thirteenth. Then there was the girl who was nice to him and Dorothy, who caused Jeremy’s ultimate ruin. These lead up to the Surprise Ending and Plot Twists.

What bothered me about this movie is that it had potential, yet it tried too hard to establish twists rather than suspense. The twists were predictable, and you never get any sense of fear. I’ll grant you, there were some gems in dialogue. Said about potential suspect Adam, played by David Boreanaz of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, “He’s no Angel, but he isn’t a killer!”

Two things that make slashers horrific fun are ridiculously gory death scenes and nudity. There was little to no nudity, only the faintest suggestion of sex, and only one of the girls, played by Denise Richards was met with an absurd death via a Halloween 2-esque hot tub scene. Overall, the characters are stiff and underdeveloped to a point where they aren’t much of real stereotypes, there is little scare factor and the plot is too jumbled and confused to even want to follow after a certain point. I’d watch it for a laugh, maybe a drinking game can be made, but not for much else.

Welcome to another It came from the Queue Review. This one came from my On Demand options under the free movies section.

It might have for the better that this was in the free section. I’d pay an extra $2.99 for “Masque of the Red Death.” “Cheater’s Club,” not so much.

This did end up in the horror section, yet this is a Lifetime Network thriller. While this film had an interesting premise, a radical therapist advocating infidelity as a means for the women in her group therapy session to help their troubled and as it turns out, sexless marriages, it had poor execution and typical Lifetime Movie network melodrama where it wasn’t needed.

This is a Lifetime movie. Therefore, men call into this therapist’s radio show berating her as immoral among other things. She ends up murdered and her patients stalked.

As a film, Cheater’s Club had an interesting premise and good set up. The problem was that like many a Lifetime made for TV movie, there is excess melodrama, the female lead almost always framed or set up to be framed on top of being stalked or otherwise abused. I was spared the myriad of household cleaner and department store commercials this time around, but I asked the same question. Is Lifetime really television for women? Did the ending of this movie have to entail a cuckolded and psychotic woman lashing out against another woman?

I am all for any movie featuring Charisma Carpenter, who was pretty good in this limited role, working well with the script provided. Thing is, this movie would have been a lot better if it were the janitor who turned out to be the killer. The creepy janitor, like the hackneyed back story, is the earmark of quality in any horror movie, or even thriller movies.

By no means, am I a fan of sororities. In my opinion, why pay dues to make friends, especially when said dues run upwards of 200 dollars depending on where you go to school and what sorority you rush. Sisterhood ho!

I’ll admit, when I rented this movie, I was not expecting very much. I was in a foul mood after dealing with a particularly vile individual and work was most craptacular. I wanted to view near cartoon gory violence and gratuitous boob shots.

It sort of delivered, but they had to put in a crappy back story, a few dream sequences, and psychobabble. This was, in fact, babble from a sorority sister that was ‘studying’ psychology. Now that I think about it, none of these cute coeds really ever went to class other than walking to one of the academic buildings and saying they were going to be late.

But mushing onward with the story-a young girl witnesses her older brother slaughter their family. She avoids harm by hiding in the basement. Several years and memory blocks later, she ends up in college and joining a sorority. One would think with the sorority membership, she ended up perfectly normal, maybe a little vapid. The wooden performance of Angela O’Neill as heroine, Beth, could indicate as such. But they try to add some depth to this character in the form of nightmares involving blood and set dinner tables. The nightmares recur and seem to get more intense as she and her girlfriends rent an old house for a short vacation.

As fate would have it, said rental house was the site of a murder. One would think that at this point, the girls and their respective fraternity member boyfriends would run and scream like cheerleaders (the pun is not lost here). Since this is a slasher movie, and a bad slasher movie at that, the girls set up a concoction involving streamers, a banner and an old statue for a spirit week of sorts-and go through the closet of their rich friend and try on her clothes. Well, at least the flick did its job in the gratuitous boobage department.

But darn the luck, a crazed killer escapes the nuthouse. And wouldn’t you know, it so happens to be Beth’s older brother looking for Beth as she is the last surviving family member. Somehow, some way, he does manage to track her to the very sorority house where she and her friends are vacationing!

By all standards, this was a pretty bland horror movie, and the attempt at a back story blatantly ripped off Halloween. I get the impression that this is geared toward the kind of viewer that only wants to see nudity and violence, which this movie had-with some semblance of a plot thrown in. I was in a bad mood when I watched it, and crap factor aside, it did hit the spot.