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Funny Man AKA Funnyman
R4 - Australia - DV1 Review written by and copyright: Noor Razzak and Roger Nicholl (1st March 2005). |
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The Film
 I love horror films, but I’m not a horror purist who demands a straight-faced respect for the genre. I fully realise that this film is supposed to be funny. The thing is, just because it’s supposed to be funny doesn’t mean it is. Funny Man is the horror equivalent of UFO: The Movie, a lame combination of bad British skit shows, an even worse puppet show, and some gore. I’m all for experimentation, but in the grand scheme of cinematic trial-and-error, this is one of the errors. The film opens with a game of poker. After some banter Callum Chance (Chrisopher Lee) bets and loses his mansion to Max Taylor (Benny Young). Max and his family move in, some of their possessions are being delivered by his brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt), who stops to pick up some hitchhikers. When they arrive no one’s there, so they investigate. But somehow Callum is controlling a guy called the Funny Man (Tim James) who starts killing everyone. Basically, this film follows the standard cookie cutter horror plot of a group of strangers in a spooky mansion. There’s a tough woman who’s supposed to be Jamaican, though her accent is atrocious, a woman dressed exactly liked Velma from Scooby Doo (but called Thelma), and some generic blokes. One-by-one the Funny Man kills them off. Oh yeah, Funny Man is a guy dressed like a jester, who has a working-class British accent, and constantly talks to the camera and dances before killing people. It’s the sort of thing that I would have thought was subversive when I was 13. There are endless amounts of British lad humour. The only problem is a lot of this humour doesn’t involve actual jokes, it’s just someone saying f*** or you daft twat in a funny accent. While watching it I knew they were jokes, and I had a feeling that someone might find it funny. But I soon realised that I didn’t. Very rarely a joke is okay. Most of the time they’re lame, drawn out, and they all have the same punch line anyway (Funny Man kills someone after pulling faces for a while). At times it’s quite tedious, how tedious is it sometimes? At one point Funny Man sneaks up on the character Jammie (Jamie Heard), well actually he does this sort of dance you’d see someone doing at a crappy Medieval Fair. She’s got headphones on and playing Super Mario Land on the old black and white Gameboy. She starts yelling at Mario to jump, so Funny Man starts jumping around. It’s almost the definition of the word thud. Is there anyone on the planet who thinks that joke is a winner? Anyone above the age of 7, I mean? Another of the numerous drawn-out killing scenes involves Thelma (Rhona Cameron) snooping around a hallway. She finds a duck feather on the floor and, for some reason, decides she needs to find the duck the feather belonged to. So she spends what seems like a million years walking around a kitchen calling for the duck while the Funny Man blows one of those birdcall whistles. The scene ends with one of the better special effects in the movie, but since it was linked to a punch line about Thelma ducking, and I realised I’d sat through the whole thing for that, I was more than just a little frustrated. On another note, Christopher Lee who has received top billing for this, appears on screen for a total of less than a minute. If you add in his occasional voice over it may stretch to a minute all up. But his footage and character aren’t exactly seamlessly integrated into the movie. After losing his house to Max Taylor he appears occasionally throughout the film reading poems or building towers from playing cards. Meanwhile the Funny Man wanders around the mansion killing people. What’s the connection between Funny Man and Callum? Why is he killing all these people? There are lame attempts to make the film about playing some kind of game, but what that game actually is is never explained.
Video
Presented in a widescreen ratio of 1.78:1, this anamorphic transfer is generally pretty good. Colours are rendered well although skin tones on occasion appear a little too red, but this is never really distracting. Blacks aren’t as defined as I’d like them to be, film grain is predominant in scenes of low light. Otherwise there is nothing particularly special about this transfer and seems to suit the film quite well.
Audio
The only audio track present on the disc is an English Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround track. I found the dialogue to be clear at all times and distortion free. Despite the facts it’s only a 2.0 surround track I was rather impressed with the quality, the track had some depth to it with a fair bit of surround activity. Optional subtitles are also available in English.
Extras
First up we have a biography for actor Christopher Lee, two text pages include a brief write up about the actor plus some trivia regarding some lesser known facts. Next is the Faces of Funny Man photo gallery consisting of 5 images of the different looks the Funny Man had during the course of the film. DV1 includes a promotional material section that includes a handful of bonus theatrical trailers, which include trailers for Never Play With The Dead, The Honeymoon Killers and Lush Life as well as the opening sequence to The Hunger: The David Bowie Collection. Finally you also get a single text page that consist of DVD credits. On the whole these extras are nothing to write home about, but for this generally low priced release you don’t expect any either.
Overall
Funny Man is so aggressively awful it may almost be worth watching with a group of friends for a laugh. After a while scenes of a laddish British clown pissing inside a van and setting people on fire with jumper cables don’t so much grow on you, as infect every pore. Afterwards you need to watch an episode of the Simpsons or a Marx Brothers film to remind yourself what funny actually is. DV1’s disc won’t break any new ground but for the price you get what you pay for, an adequate transfer, a slightly better soundtrack and extras that will take you minutes to go through.
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