Funnyman

If your mansion house needs haunting, just call... the Funnyman. Undecided about whether it's a comedy or a horror, it tries to be both and ends up neither.

The Jester would scare the pants off you if you were eight years old. However, you're not eight any more. Freddy Kruger dressed as Mr Claypole is less scary than Mr Claypole dressed as... er... Mr Claypole.

There is some witty banter, a few funny exchanges of dialogue and some top-drawer 'just nodding' acting. The Club Sexy sequence (up until 'Hardman' meets his end) is the highlight of the film.

With the Jesters big rubber head, I'm reminded of Bo' Selecta – Series 3. Just like Bo' Selecta – Series 3 it could've been good… but it's not.

The makers of FUNNY MAN seem to have wanted to create a 100% English version of such wisecracking horror figures as Freddy Krueger, and the figure they've chosen seems on the mark: he's a living embodiment of a joker from a deck of cards. Other joker/jester images are scattered throughout the film.

But the problems overwhelm the movie: to begin with, there's no story. A guy wins a house in a card game (why is the card game in the U.S.?) and moves into it. The Funny Man promptly erupts from the floor and starts killing the new arrivals, including some others who show up later on. But at no point is there even the slightest hint as to WHY this is going on. We never have any idea as to the Funny Man's motives, or the failings (if any) of the people he kills. There's a slight hint that all this is the delusions of an insane Christopher Lee -- but the madhouse scene is in exactly the same style as the rest of the film.

The Funny Man isn't funny (though the makeup is impressive), and isn't even intelligible to most Americans much of the time. Effects are minimal (although there's one bit with a hand spreading wide that's unnerving -- and meaningless), but the photography and use of color are actually quite impressive. It's impossible to judge most of the performances, since the characters (if that's the word) are drawn so broadly that they're repellent caricatures from the moment we meet them. We not only don't give a damn if they die, we don't even know who the heck they ARE (or why they're dying).

Reportedly, the movie was made as an effort to revive English horror, but this ponderous, pretentious mess, unfunny, confusing and inconclusive, wouldn't have revived anything. Some praise is due Christopher Lee for cooperating with this effort; it was an act of courage and generosity. Too bad it was for such a sorry end product.

If there's one thing I've learned from reading the other reviews around here, it's definitely that "Funny Man" is the type of film that you either praise into the heavens or hate with a passion; there doesn't appear to be a middle way. Personally I'm tempted to unite with the hate crew, but that is preeminently because the fan-boys are exaggeratedly enthusiast without using real arguments. They merely just claim that "Funny Man" is awesomely hilarious; period. I even encountered some reviews where people dreadfully stated that the adversaries of this movie simply "don't get" the type of humor. See, I really hate that… What exactly is there to "get"? It's a cheesy and low-budgeted 90's horror movie about an ugly jester killing off uninteresting characters whilst firing off lousy and wannabe clever one-liners, so it's fairly safe to say there's absolutely nothing specific "to get" here. I'll be the first to admit that "Funny Man" also contains a handful of ingenious elements and mildly amusing gags. The main problem, however, are the bad ratios. For every brief flash of inventiveness, there's an intolerably large amount of tedious sequences. For every effective joke, there's literally a truckload of embarrassingly lame and painfully misplaced farces. After approximately 50 minutes of running time, you've pretty much seen and heard about as much as any normal person can take and the last half hour is practically unendurable to sit through. "Funny Man" is probably the most atypical British horror movie I've seen. Traditionally speaking, British genre movies implement a distinct and easy recognizable sense of humor, but this one is as vulgar and insipid as any random amateur US trash production. Most likely more than half of the entire budget was spent on convincing the almighty Christopher Lee to make a cameo appearance among an extended cast of untalented nobodies. Lee briefly pops up at the beginning of the film and portrays a sinister guy in a white suit who gambles his ancestral house in a game of poker and loses it to a sleazy drug-addicted record producer. The joke's on him – literally – because Christopher forgot to mention anything about the psychopathic buffoon living there. The Funny Man quickly disposes of the producer's family and eagerly awaits the next shipment of brainless victims to waste. They arrive in the form of a van filled with dimwits looking like runaways from a canceled Scooby-Doo episode. Some of the killing scenes are amusing and imaginatively repellent (like the duck hunting and puppet theater), but the majority of them are plain dull and overlong. The Jester may sound like a potentially cool new horror icon, but he's actually rather uninspired and boring. His appearance seems to be based on Jack Nicholson in "Batman" mixed with a "Killer Klown from Outer Space", with the stand-up comedian talents of Chucky the Good Guy Doll or maybe even Freddy Kruger in the later installments of "Nightmare on Elm Street". He has no bizarre background or occult myth attached to him and even the house he operates in doesn't have a morbid history. Well, there we have the problem… "Funny Man" is a movie without depth. Get that?

This movie is both hilarious and quite nasty. Some of the deaths in the movie are shocking; they are both gruesome and very original. It will more likely be liked better by the brits than the americans just because of the sense of humour but believe me if you can see this then do cause it is very funny:D

Disregard the many negative reviews of this film below. It is actually an odd little hidden gem. The story is about a man who wins a card game against Christopher Lee, who then gives him his large old house. The man moves into the house with his family, and they soon discover a sinister jester who resides there, the Funnyman.

This pesky little guy kills people in different ways; some of them are outrageously gory and over the top, and a little bit like Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. The joker also speaks in a variety of British accents, and takes on different personas, such as a club owner, a footballer, and a few other weird guises.

The film is low budget and very English, and may not appeal to overseas audiences; but it's a worthy effort considering its budget. If you want a horror film with comical gory scenes, dark humour, sprinkles of English silliness, and something different, check out the Funnyman. You might like it.