Leofwine_draca Not in the least bit funny, this comedy horror was, although it breaks my heart to say it, made in Britain, and, although it pains my very soul to admit it, stars Christopher Lee. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Poor old Lee, we can't blame him for appearing in these things though; everyone needs to make a living, after all.The "plot" is a retread of a typical American slasher film of the 1980s, with a group of people in a mansion being bumped off by a psycho killer dressed as 'Punch' from Punch and Judy who offers us the worst one-liners you will ever hear in the history of comedy. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger's wince-inducing puns in BATMAN AND ROBIN come nowhere close to the obnoxious stupidity of the material on offer here.For me, the film falls flat in every sense. The characters are all ridiculously unfunny, the deaths are simply stupid, the comedy doesn't work and there is no horror. Luckily Christopher Lee doesn't have much screen time to embarrass himself. The film does try, but it's just all downhill from the start. The opening scene is actually quite good, where Lee is engaged in a card game and loses everything to a joker in the pack ("You're a funny man, but I've met funnier" is his simple reply). But switch off straight after it finishes, or you're in for one of the worst times of your life.

Coventry 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?

ElijahCSkuggs I'm a sucker for things bizarre. So when I first saw the cover of Funny Man a few years back I was instantly drawn to it. But with incredibly mixed reviews I was pretty hesitant to dish out the big bucks to attain it. Well, I finally got my hands on Funny Man, and I'm unhappy to say, it wasn't worth the wait.Funny Man is about this evil Joker lookin' character that resides in this huge mansion. A family and then a group of hitch-hikers make their way to the mansion, and unbeknownst to them they are all about to meet the Funny Man, and their demise. It's really that simple. The flick is basically just a means to show the Funny Man kill people in unique and funny ways. Too bad they weren't very unique or that funny.The flick severely disappoints in the laugh department. It's a very silly and over-the-top type flick, which usually for this guy is the right ingredients for some good laughs, but not with this script or these actors. Funny Man is occasionally smirk worthy but rarely ever anything more. The actor playing him does a pretty good job as the character, but, it's just not very interesting. We don't know why he lives there, or why he's a killer. And not until the end, does a serious tone present itself where and it gives you a tiny clue into Funny Man's existence. It's just who he is. That's it. And there's this very intriguing world mysterious village that Funny Man lives in underneath the mansion, but it's not even slightly talked about. Again, another missed opportunity. If the movie focused a little more on the Funny Man's back-story, the movie would have had a much more interesting sub-plot. But instead we have a crappy, awful sub-plot concerning a washed up guitarist, and a pretty generic character with a mysterious Jamaican woman who instantly knows about the Funny Man's evil presence. Oh and she has a gun....for a hand, but it ain't as cool as you'd think. The film is also incredibly 'British. But just because it's full of British sayings and silly gags doesn't make it instantly funny. Hell, they didn't even make fun of the British's teeth in the flick. Now that would have been funny! There are far more funnier flicks than this that have come out of Britain, and it doesn't take a genius to "get" British humor, I enjoy it to a high degree, but this just doesn't cut it.The flick barely does anything above average and mostly just exists to have a weirdo character kill a bunch of people. Sure some of the deaths were kinda cool, a couple smiles and giggles were okay but overall, it wasn't enough to make this film entertaining. Shame too, cause the flick felt like it had a lot of potential. Oh well. Give it a shot if you're into horror/comedies, but don't expect anything great. 4.5 outta 10

django-shagnasty Hi all, I'm a Brit living in Canada, and saw this film on the recommendation of a friend still in the UK. Talk about hard to get hold of! I started watching it on a couple of occasions, hindered by a 10 year old and a wife who is not keen on horror. From the few runs through the first 20 minutes, I was not mad-keen on watching the rest of the film.I was wrong - I've watched it start to finish 3 times in the last week. It's good. It's rough, but it's good. The humour is coarse, the violence is excessive and the effects are technically limited, by today's standards, but it works well.The 'good guys' don't come out of it well, but who cares? They're the sort of folks you'd happily not widdle on if they were on fire. I know a lot of folks crippled by the idea that films, and life, should be nice & end happily. We need more dark humour!