Funhouse is a 2020 horror film.
8 social media celebrities from around the world are invited to a remote mansion to participate in a brand-new elimination-style Reality TV show. After several days, they discover that the elimination is final and only one person will be left standing at the end.
This film provides examples of:
- Bears Are Bad News: Nero Alexander uses the avatar of a CGI panda named Furcas to communicate with the contestants. The guards also wear panda masks.
- Cat Fight: Subverted. Ximena and Ula, two attractive young women, end up being forced to fight each other to the death after they've been sniping at each other for days. However, the fight between them is realistically brutal with no stripping or hair-pulling as they are given battle axes and the light is turned off to make it more difficult.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Not all of them. Some of the execution methods, like dying from a bullet to the head or being beaten to death are almost merciful compared to the more creatively cruel ones:
- Dex is lowered into a vat full of Hollywood Acid for trying to escape. When he's pulled out, his entire lower body has been dissolved.
- Ula is slowly quartered after she loses both her memory challenge and the spinning wheel of death.
- Defiant to the End: When Headstone finds out that Nero was lying to him about the rules of the cage fight, he calls Nero a coward and goes down fighting.
- Dwindling Party: The contestants are participating in a Deadly Game popularity contest. Every 3 days, Furcas will announce the current vote tally with snarky and malicious commentary. The contestant with the lowest vote will face a challenge that almost inevitably ends with their death. However, if the lowest votes are within a percentage point of each other, they will have to compete against each other for survival.
- Famous for Being Famous: Many of the contestants are people who have become famous for being tabloid fodder. Kasper in particular is singled out because he became a reality TV star by happening to marry a female pop star.
- Hollywood Acid: For breaking the rules and trying to escape, Furcas murders Dex by forcing him to bathe in fluoroantimonic acid. While H2FSbF6 is indeed the most corrosive superacid that can be created on Earth, it's also so exothermic that it would be highly impractical as a murder weapon.
- Hope Spot: Headstone manages to narrowly beat Botas in a Duel to the Death despite the latter's massive size advantage. Nero congratulates him, only to reveal that he will now have to fight the other 3 Wrestling Monsters simultaneously while already being exhausted from the first fight.
- Ms. Fanservice: Ula is a Russian instagram model who manages to get a lot of votes by turning the camera on in her shower. She becomes more desperate after she learns the true nature of the Deadly Game and starts breaking into tears on camera. After a while, even the audience starts to tire of this after she tries to seduce Kasper, which is cruelly mocked by Furcas.
- Multinational Team: The contestants are E-celebs from numerous different countries, including the United States, Mexico, the UK, Ireland, Russia, and Sweden.
- murder.com: A group of minor celebrities are invited onto a Reality TV show at an undisclosed location to win 5 million dollars. They don't discover that they are fighting for their lives until the first guy who gets voted off by the global audience watching them is tortured to death in front of them. The FBI does make a concerted effort to track down the signal or at least cut off the feed, but all their attempts prove fruitless and the entire thing is aired up to the end.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: When Kasper confronts Nero on why he's torturing and murdering 8 innocent people, Nero goes on a rant calling all of them worthless people who haven't contributed anything meaningful to society. Kasper doesn't buy it and points out that beneath his veneer, Nero is just a sadist.
- Sarcastic Title: It's a house where people are murdered for an audience.
- Sex for Solace: After Headstone's tragic death and with only 3 contestants remaining, Kasper and Lonnie decide to have sex. Meanwhile, Mouse decides to put on a show for the camera by masturbating.
- Wrestling Monster: Headstone's challenge is to fight 1 of 4 such opponents in a cage match: Vapula, an Apunkalypse barbarian; Sabnock, a Monster Clown; Botis, a giant with a Skull for a Head; or Orobas, a Brutal Butcher with a pig mask.
