The Funhouse -Collectors Edition- -Blu-ray-

Product Description Director Tobe Hooper ( The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) pays affectionate tribute to various classic horror movies in this tale of two teenage couples who spend the night in a sleazy carnival funhouse. On her first date with Buzz (Cooper Huckabee, True Blood), Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus) disobeys her father and goes to the carnival with Richie (Miles Chapin, Hair) and Liz (Largo Woodruff), but their first date may end up as their last. After witnessing a murder, the four terrified teens are trapped in the maze of the funhouse and stalked by a real monster, a horribly deformed killer who lurks among the freakish exhibits waiting to butcher them one by one. Funhouse also stars Sylvia Miles ( Midnight Cowboy) and Kevin Conway (in three roles) and features special makeup designs by Academy Award winner Rick Baker ( An American Werewolf In London, Ed Wood). Amazon.com Though by no means a classic on par with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981) is an atmospheric thriller that offers a frequently effective mix of suspense and shock that bucks the body-count aesthetic of the then-current slasher trend. Hooper puts his cards on the table early in the picture by offering a tongue-in-cheek homage to both Psycho and Halloween, which serve as the boundary markers for the territory in which the picture operates. That translates into a more relaxed pace in the film's first third, which follows a quartet of teens at a rural carnival, as well as attention to detail which heightens the inherent creepiness of the location, which is rife with seedy figures (including character actor Kevin Conway as three different but equally louche barkers) and unsettling animatronic attractions. Hooper also draws from both pictures for his main antagonist, a disfigured man named Gunther (Wayne Doba) in a Frankenstein mask who stalks the quartet after they are locked into the funhouse after closing time. It's to the director's credit that Gunther comes across as both implacable and pitiable at the same time, an agreeable wrinkle on the standard slasher archetype that further helps to set The Funhouse apart from the '80s-era horror crowd. Differences such as these also keep the film feeling fresh and inventive in a way that many psycho-thrillers from the same period fail to retain; the end result is a horror effort wor