The mysterious Callum Chance (Christopher Lee) loses his ancestral home – a large manor house – in a poker game to cocky coke-sniffing music producer Max Taylor (Benny Young), who moves with his wife, Tina (Ingrid Lacey) and two children, Harry (Harry Heard) and Jammie (Jamie Heard), into the house.
Meanwhile, his loser brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt) is travelling in an old bus to deliver Max’s belonging to the house.
Along the way, he picks up a motley assortment of hitchhikers – a crap puppeteer (George Morton), a hard man (Chris Walker), a demonically possessed Jamaican voodoo hippy (Pauline Black from The Selecter) and a runaway from a live-action Scooby-Doo film (a superb performance from Scottish comedienne Rhona Cameron).
What nobody knows is that a homicidal demon jester known as “the Funny Man” (Tim James) lives in the manor and is thirsty for blood.
The demon with a northern accent (he’s a sort of cross between Freddy Krueger and Roy Chubby Brown) finds imaginative and gruesome ways to end his victims – burrowing through someone’s stomach, sticking a stiletto heel in someone’s eye, and battering another person to death with a baseball bat – usually accompanied by a mildly amusing one-liner (he breaks the fourth wall endlessly, letting us in on his murderous antics).
Shot largely at a former mental hospital in Henley-on-Thames over a five-week period, this low-budget English film is truly awful.
There’s very little in the way of a story – director/writer Simon Sprackling admitted they decided to “just start filming and see what happens” – and the film switches wildly from straight horror to slapstick comedy to deadpan humour to downright crudeness. Most ironically of all, Funny Man isn’t funny.
Funny Man
Tim James Callum Chance
Christopher Lee Max Taylor
Benny Young Tina Taylor
Ingrid Lacey Jammie Taylor
Jamie Heard Harry Taylor
Harry Heard Johnny Taylor
Matthew Devitt Senga the Psychic Commando
Pauline Black The Hard Man
Chris Walker Thelma Fudd
Rhona Cameron The Crap Puppeteer
George Morton Card Players
Bob Sessions
Ed Bishop
John Chancer Nurse
Jana Shelden Waiter
Barnaby North Radio DJ (voice)
Steve Wright
Director
Simon Sprackling
Video
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Meanwhile, his loser brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt) is travelling in an old bus to deliver Max’s belonging to the house.
The demon with a northern accent (he’s a sort of cross between Freddy Krueger and Roy Chubby Brown) finds imaginative and gruesome ways to end his victims – burrowing through someone’s stomach, sticking a stiletto heel in someone’s eye, and battering another person to death with a baseball bat – usually accompanied by a mildly amusing one-liner (he breaks the fourth wall endlessly, letting us in on his murderous antics).
