#To catch a lover funhaus full#
They arrive at the house - decorated like the Korova Milk Bar Lite - expecting a typical reality show experience full of drinking, hot tub shenanigans, and self-promoting confessionals. Of course, the eight victims don’t know that the premise is quite so punishing when they first sign up for the show. Still from FUNHOUSE l Courtesy of Magnet Releasing In one of many missed opportunities in the film, FUNHOUSE never addresses how terrifying (and pathetic) it is that Nero seems to stare unblinking at his monitor for weeks on end just so he can torture captive strangers. Nero never seems to sleep: Funhouse is streamed live to audiences 24/7 over the course of a couple of weeks, and Furcas/Nero reacts to the goings-on in the house at lightning speed regardless of the time of day. The viewer soon learns that Furcas is actually Nero in a motion-capture suit who acts out all of Furcas’s movements. Furcas is a cartoon panda wearing a crown who interacts with the cast in real-time with a disturbingly gravelly voice. If they lose (and they almost always lose), they are brutally murdered.īizarrely, the reality show is originally called Furcas’s House of Fun, to be shortened later in the film to Funhouse. The person with the lowest number of votes has to complete a challenge to try to stay in the house. Combining Saw and Hostel with Big Brother, Nero devises a reality show that confines eight D-list celebrities to a compound and asks viewers to vote for their favorite celebrity every three days. His satisfaction only lasts a second or two, though, so he decides to seek greater fulfillment with Funhouse. He then forces her to crawl to him and literally offer up the dead woman’s heart on a silver platter. The film opens on Nero scrolling through his phone listlessly as a young woman beats another young woman to death in front of him.
Unevenly paced and insistent on spelling out its themes in leaden dialogue, FUNHOUSE isn’t the trenchant social commentary it wants to be, nor is it fun enough to enjoy with your brain turned off.īored now that there are no more worlds to conquer, the young and smugly “self-made” billionaire Nero Alexander ( Jerome Velinsky) tries to entertain himself with bloodsport. The film can’t reconcile its tonal twists, leading to mixed messages that direct the viewer’s outrage toward the film itself rather than the target(s) Lee was actually aiming for. Courtesy of Magnet ReleasingThe great Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” He would have loved FUNHOUSE, writer-director Jason William Lee’s leering and mean-spirited horror satire.
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