I found a copy of my old review when this came out of Laserdisc (remember them?) the same month and from the same distributor as Beyond Bedlam (hence the references to Paul Brooks): I didn't seem too keen for some reason...
Maybe the problem with the British film industry isn't that there isn't the money to invest in British films, it's that people are investing in the wrong films. Beyond Bedlam's producer Paul Brooks often publicly decries the tyranny of the sub-Merchant Ivory cinema and the tendency to make films for a handful of friends, but in reality he's doing exactly the same; the only difference is that where they are imitating better films they saw in the cinema in the sixties, he's imitating schlock he saw on video with his mates after a trip to the pub and local curry house. Yes, it's great that British filmmakers are beginning to make genre films aimed at the general public again, but as with these two astonishingly inept efforts, do they have to be so very bad?
Funnyman wants to be an English Bad Taste (the first to get it are the children) but only manages the bad. A highly ineffectual splatter flick, it goes through the tired-and-tested usual run of 'imaginative' killings before ending in a rock and roll number - just like Morons From Outer Space and Howard the Duck, but don't let that make you think it's anywhere near as good as either: even worse than Bloodbath at the House of Death, this really is shit on a stick.
The gimmick here is that the killer is a demonic medieval Welsh jester, but the character just isn't that funny, especially in an era when all supernatural psycho serial killers have to double as stand-up comics, and it scores minus points both in the fright and filmmaking stakes as it surely and steadily gets worse and worse and worse after an indifferent and moderately painless start. Continuity is a word clearly not in the film-maker's vocabularies, but then neither is competence or, as they proudly boast, sobriety. Yet even if you'd done enough drink and drinks to have completely destroyed your every rational brain function, you'd be able to little more than tolerate it. Certainly, as drunken pleasures go, it lacks the appeal of, say, rolling around in the gutter or choking on your own vomit.
The supplementaries on this typically impeccable Encore release are substantial, but the more than half-hour of the electronic press kit, trailers and video merely drag out the pain, while the booklet containing a diary of the shooting merely confirms all your worst suspicions. The producers seem to delight in spreading the tale that filming was one long round of drink and drugs to promote a laddish reputation, but while this certainly looks more like a drunken dare than a film, you get the impression they're just using that as an excuse. There should be an Act of Parliament passed to prevent some of these people from ever making a film again (Rhona Cameron's turn as a 'Velma'-like ghost-hunter alone made this reviewer reconsider his opposition to the death penalty), while others, such as Ingrid Lacey and Matthew Devitt, you just feel awfully sorry for and hope that they find a better agent soon. And Christopher Lee - why? Surely you don't need the money? One can only assume from your comments on the EPK that they showed you another script (reputedly the case).
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