cinema history class: the funhouse (1981)

The session: Work-Aways

Four Movies with horrible horrible characters who remind Keith of some of our craziest work-away stories

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: The Funhouse (1981)
Directed by Tobe Hooper

My Level of Prior Knowledge
Never heard of it.

Plot:
A group of teenagers sneak into a traveling carnival’s funhouse after hours, hoping for a night of thrills. Instead, they become trapped, and are stalked by a grotesque masked killer hiding among the carnival attractions. As the night unfolds, the funhouse turns into a deadly maze where escape becomes increasingly desperate.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
After watching The Funhouse, I’m comfortable saying this: it’s not a work of art, but it absolutely delivers on what it promises. Between the acting, the camera work, and especially the makeup, it does a terrific job of creating a deeply creepy carnival atmosphere—even before you fully register that the people running the place are inbred freaks. That mood of unease is there almost immediately, which matters, because the movie is otherwise pretty formula-driven and stuffed with familiar horror tropes (seriously, does anyone in real life ever climb down a trellis?).

What really surprised me was how much it stirred up childhood memories. Once or twice as a kid I got to see a traveling carnival roll into Honesdale, PA, and this movie brought those memories back—then smeared them with grime, menace, and dread. That’s probably the film’s biggest success: it takes something already a little uncanny and just keeps nudging it further into nightmare territory.

There are things that don’t quite sit right, though. I assume the parents are so odd-looking because it helped set the tone, but did it really have to be that on-the-nose? And the opening scene—an obvious Psycho homage—does a great job setting the tone, but it’s also genuinely unsettling in an unintended way: a kid exposing his big sister’s breasts while she barely reacts? That’s less “homage” and more “why did no one flag this?”

Still, the central idea—a traveling carnival run by inbred freaks—is actually kind of interesting, and it carries the movie a long way. Elizabeth Berridge, in particular, is really good here, which makes me wonder why she didn’t become a bigger scream-queen name. Bad timing? Market saturation? Just one of those horror-career mysteries.

The biggest problem, though, is that no one is likable. At all. Which makes it hard to care when they start getting picked off, because you’re not rooting for anyone so much as waiting for the next kill. But even with that flaw, The Funhouse succeeds where it counts: it creates unease early, sustains it effectively, and leaves you feeling like you’ve wandered into a place you definitely shouldn’t have—and stayed too long.

Joe gave it a 10, but stop me if you've heard that one before.

baseball stoopidstats: wins through 2025

One of my annual rituals is checking how cumulative win totals have shifted the historical rankings. Most years, the changes are modest, which is exactly what you’d expect when you’re layering a single season onto more than a century of baseball history. Still, even small movements can be revealing, especially when they involve long-defunct teams, obsolete nicknames, or modern branding oddities.

At the franchise level, all of the changes involved active teams. That’s not surprising: each of the thirty current franchises has more cumulative wins than any one of the 150 defunct franchises, so none of the defunct fran chises could have moved. The Astros moved from 18th to 17th, passing the Angels. The Mets moved from 20th to 19th, passing the Rangers, though that “passing” comes with an asterisk: the Mets and Rangers are now tied in total wins, and I give the Mets the edge because they have fewer losses. The Marlins moved from 28th to 27th, passing the Rockies.

There was only one change in the location rankings, though it technically involved two locations switching places. “N/A,” my category for teams whose names did not include a geographic location, moved from 41st to 40th, passing Providence. This year’s Athletics season counts toward “N/A,” since the team played without a location in its name. The last time Providence appeared as a team location was 1885, so this was a case of a 21st-century naming decision nudging past a city that hasn’t had a major-league team since the 19th century.

The lone change in state rankings mirrors that shift almost exactly. “N/A” moved from 27th to 26th, passing Rhode Island. That’s no coincidence: Providence is the only location ever associated with a Rhode Island team, so once Providence slipped, Rhode Island followed.

The most activity this year came in the nickname rankings. “Mariners” moved from 28th to 27th, passing “N/A,” my category for teams that played without a nickname. The last time a team lacked a nickname was 1911, which once felt safely locked in baseball’s distant past. A few years ago, I would have said the same about teams playing without a location in their name, so clearly I should be careful with declarations like that.

In just its fourth year of use, “Guardians” jumped from 66th to 60th, passing six nicknames that are no longer in use: Hoosiers (last used in 1914), Metropolitans (1887), Cubans (1948), Orphans (1901), Club (1932), and ABCs (1938). It’s a good reminder of how quickly an active franchise can accumulate enough wins to move past names that survive only as historical curiosities. Elsewhere in the nickname rankings, “Astros” moved from 19th to 18th, passing “Mets,” while “Marlins” moved from 31st to 30th, passing “Rockies.”

Finally, a few milestones are worth noting. The Cincinnati Reds passed 11,000 franchise victories. The Boston Red Sox passed 10,000. And Pennsylvania passed 28,000 total victories for teams with locations in the state, including Altoona (6 victories), Harrisburg (151), Hilldale (282), Homestead (636), Pittsburgh (11,367) and Philadelphia (15,634).

As usual, the rankings didn’t lurch; they crept. But in those small shifts you can still see the slow accumulation of modern seasons, the fading weight of long-defunct teams, and the occasional reminder that baseball history has a way of colliding with the present in unexpected ways.

cinema history class: beyond the darkness (1979)

The session: Work-Aways

Four Movies with horrible horrible characters who remind Keith of some of our craziest work-away stories

(Note: I could not find the trailer on Youtube, so I am sharing this instead.

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: Beyond the Darkness (1979)
Directed by Joe D'Amato

My Level of Prior Knowledge
Never heard of it.

Plot:
A disturbed taxidermist can't bear to say goodbye to his deceased lover, so he preserves her corpse, keeping it hidden in his home. When his obsession deepens, he embarks on a series of increasingly gruesome murders to prevent others from discovering his secret.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
The first thing that grabbed me about Beyond the Darkness was the music. Keith has shown us a bunch of movies scored by Goblin over the years, and their electronic soundtracks are always a treat—and I kind of got a kick out of the fact that this movie credits them as “The Goblins,” which somehow feels even more perfect. Between that pulsing, uneasy score and the absolutely first-rate gore effects (yes, including the cannibalism), the movie is constantly doing something to keep your attention. The effects work is genuinely impressive and often stunning, even by Italian horror standards.

Story-wise, it’s hard not to notice how much the film borrows from Psycho, especially in its setup and obsessions. That said, the plot still feels like it needed one more pass. The private investigator, in particular, feels underused—he’s introduced like he’s going to matter in a big way, but then he’s mostly just… there. When the movie finally delivers its “punchline” with him, it’s not entirely clear what point it’s trying to make, which makes the whole thread feel like a tease that never quite pays off.

Oddly enough, though, despite those narrative shortcomings, the movie does more character development than I expected. There’s an attempt to understand the people involved rather than just using them as fodder, which adds an unexpected layer. And honestly, between Goblin’s score and the relentless, beautifully executed gore, I was pretty much enthralled the whole time anyway—plot gaps and all.

Of course, Joe rated it a 10. But so did Ethan, and he's the toughest grader in the class. So maybe Joe's rating is actually justified this time.

cinema history class: death line (1972)

 he session: Work-Aways

Four Movies with horrible horrible characters who remind Keith of some of our craziest work-away stories

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Death Line (1972)
Directed by Gary Sherman

My Level of Prior Knowledge
Never heard of it.

Plot:
When people begin vanishing in a London Underground station, the search uncovers a tragic, feral survivor living in the abandoned tunnels — a remnant of a forgotten disaster whose hunger drives the horror beneath the city.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

At first glance, Death Line may seem like fairly standard ’70s British horror—subways, missing commuters, gloomy lighting—but it turns out to be weirder, bloodier, and honestly more artful than I ever expected. The standout for me was the camera work. There’s a jaw-dropping 360-degree pan through the monster’s underground lair—one long unbroken shot that glides past corpses, debris, and our poor doomed characters. For a movie that otherwise feels small and grimy, that moment was gorgeous. I didn’t expect to call anything in this film “gorgeous,” but here we are.

The whole thing has a vibe very reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre—that same oppressive grime and sense that the characters have wandered into a forgotten pocket of humanity that really should’ve been left forgotten. But it’s actually gorier than TCM, which is saying something. The makeup work is terrific, too: the monsters look sickly, feral, and completely believable, like something that really could have evolved in the dark over decades.

Plot-wise, I have to confess: I didn’t fully get everything while watching. There are really only two monsters left, descendants of a group of workers trapped underground long ago, and they’ve only started grabbing passengers recently because the second one has died, leaving the last survivor desperate enough to venture out. Joe (or maybe Bobbo—I forget who gets the credit/blame here) laid all this out for me afterwards. It was in the exposition from the police, but somehow the meaning didn’t land for me in the moment. Not sure if that’s a flaw in the movie or if I was just having a slow night. Let’s generously say it’s 50/50.

What surprised me most is how oddly sympathetic the surviving monster is. Yes, he’s a cannibal and yes, he does terrible things, but the movie really leans into the idea that he’s more a victim of circumstance—lonely, wounded, and hardly articulate. There’s a strange pathos there that I wasn’t expecting, and it gives the whole story a little emotional dimension beyond “creature feature.” The cannibalism angle itself isn’t even played up that heavily; it’s there, but not milked for shock value.

The film also does a nice slow burn—creeping tension, a few genuinely well-executed jump scares—and then… well, the ending kind of just happens. After all the buildup, it feels a bit anticlimactic. Not a deal-breaker, but definitely a soft landing compared to the dread leading up to it.

A huge unexpected delight is Donald Pleasance as the police detective. He seems to be having the time of his life, tossing in dry humor, snapping at his assistant, and milking a running gag about tea that breaks the darkness just enough without feeling out of place. In a movie this bleak, a little comedy goes a long way, and Pleasance knows exactly how far to take it.

Overall, Death Line is a grimy, atmospheric slow burner with some surprisingly beautiful filmmaking and a memorable monster who manages to be terrifying and tragic all at once. Even with a muddled plot moment or two, it’s a fascinating little horror gem—and that 360-degree shot alone is worth the price of admission.

And Joe rated it a 10. Stop me if you've heard this one before...

cinema history class: antropophagus (1980)

The session: Work-Aways
Four Movies with horrible horrible characters who remind Keith of some of our craziest work-away stories

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Antropophagus (1980)
Directed by Joe D'Amato

My Level of Prior Knowledge
Never heard of it.

Plot:
A group of tourists, stranded on a remote Greek island, discover that its inhabitants have been slaughtered by a monstrous, cannibal. As they explore further, they’re hunted one by one by the deranged killer.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Antropophagus is one of those grimy Euro-slashers that, at first glance, looks like it’s going to follow the standard “tourists stumble into trouble” formula — and for a while, it does. The first act feels almost poky, like the movie is wandering around the island with the characters. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, it becomes a genuine slow burn: the dread keeps tightening, the atmosphere gets heavier, and by the time the violence fully erupts, I realized I was basically holding my breath.

And when the gore comes…wow, they did not phone it in. This thing goes far beyond the usual knife-in-the-dark slasher kills. We get the disturbing “impromptu abortion” sequence, with the killer literally eating a human fetus, someone being pulled through the roof of a building by the scalp, and of course the finale where a monster sees his own guts spilling out of his abdomen and decides to eat them. It’s disgusting, yes, but it’s also surprisingly well-staged and legitimately unsettling. There’s a nasty kind of artistry to it.

The throbbing electronic score is another huge part of why the movie works. It worms its way into your nerves — pulsing, buzzing, vibrating beneath everything like a diseased heartbeat. Even in scenes where nothing is happening, the soundtrack insists that something awful is about to.

And for extra fun, the movie isn’t shy about wearing its influences on its sleeve. There’s a scene lifted so blatantly from Jaws that I half expected the characters to hum the theme. Later on, the film pulls a Carrie-style shock moment that feels like it wandered in from another movie but somehow still fits the vibe.

Antropophagus is revolting, often ridiculous, sometimes sluggish, but ultimately effective — a weirdly well-made piece of Euro-nastiness whose reputation is absolutely earned.

Joe missed this one, so he couldn't rate it a 10. He would have tried to give it a 12, but Bobbo wouldn't have let him