Funny Man – review

A weird, wonderful and quintessentially British treat, says Sloame Ocean

The titular Funny Man

FUNNY MAN (1994)

DIRECTOR: Simon Sprackling

COUNTRY: UK

RUNNING TIME: 90 mins

WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Monty Python, League of Gentlemen

AH, the horror-comedy: so rarely scary, so rarely funny. When done well, we get a film as sublime as AnAmerican Werewolf in London.  When done badly, the scares lack bite and the jokes fall flat.

One rare exception to this rule is Simon Sprackling’s subversive 1994 debut, Funny Man, a uniquely British film that mixes scenes of splatstick gore with an utterly twisted sense of humour.

The film opens with a prologue in which coke-snorting record producer Max Taylor (Benny Young) wins the keys to Callum Chance’s (Christopher Lee) ancestral home in a game of poker. Taylor wastes no time in deciding to move his family into the place. However, shortly after arriving, Taylor’s wife (Ingrid Lacey) informs him that she has no intention of living in the house and, as she’s ‘too rich to be unhappy’, Taylor acquiesces.

He informs her that as soon as his brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt) arrives with their possessions, they can be on their way. Johnny turns out to be a failed guitar hero fated to spend his days lamenting what could have been and operating a removal business.

On his way to the mansion, he picks up four hitchhikers: the Hard Man (Chris Walker), a misogynistic northerner; the Crap Puppeteer (George Morton), whose specialty is a politically correct version of Punch and Judy; the Psychic Commando (Pauline Black), a tarot-card reading Jamaican and finally, Thelma Fudd, (Rhona Cameron) a bird-watching nerd who bears an uncanny resemblance to Velma from Scooby-Doo.

As Taylor’s family kills time waiting for Johnny’s arrival by exploring the house – a wonderfully eerie location strewn with joker and other assorted playing card imagery – they come across a game room. One quick spin of a wheel later and the Funny Man (Tim James), a kind of demonic jester, emerges from the structure of the house itself and begins a murderous rampage that will occupy the remainder of the film.

The sub-genre to which Funny Man bares most resemblance is the slasher: one by one a group of characters is stalked, isolated and killed by a homicidal maniac. But the rules of the slasher typically require that we have at least one character with whom to identify, in most cases the Final Girl of Carol J Clover’s seminal discussion of the genre, Men, Women and Chainsaws. Yet in Funny Man, there are no real hero figures for us to get behind. The only viable option comes in the form of the Psychic Commando and while she comes closest to disrupting the Funny Man’s antics, she ultimately proves no match for him.

As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well

As such, Sprackling offers us no choice but to root for the Funny Man himself. Sure, he’s a violent killer, but he’s a lot more charismatic than Jason Voorhees ever was and he gets the funniest lines here. Fortunately, Tim James is more than up to the job that the role demands of him: his performance is an anarchic thrill. Whether he’s casually strolling the corridors and grounds of the house, hunch-backed and endowed with an over-sized phallus, or dressed in drag performing a most alarming striptease at Club Sexy’s Psychedelic Wig Evening, James is a delight. As the film progresses, the Funny Man dispatches the rest of the cast in a number of remarkably creative ways,  while directly addressing the audience in a manner that makes us complicit in his actions.

Reviews at the time of the film’s original release compared it to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an analogy which makes complete sense: the humour is undoubtedly British and more often than not, surreal. More significantly though, once the Funny Man appears, the film soon settles into something of a sketch-show rhythm. As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well.

Its ambitions are occasionally betrayed by its low budget, the film drags at times and the final 15 minutes are somewhat anti-climactic. Nevertheless, James’ gleefully manic performance more than makes up for these shortcomings and a willing audience will find much to enjoy here;  Funny Man is an irreverent treasure ripe for rediscovery.