Funhouse and Deadly Blessing for Halloween from Arrow
24 September 2007

In the run up to Halloween, older horror titles are being dusted off for a DVD release, and joining the fray is Arrow Films, who have announced two little seen cult favourites from 1981 for an October UK release, both of them early works by two of the genre's biggest names.

Deadly Blessing was director Wes Craven's horror follow up to his notorious debut The Last House on the Left (1972) and his 1977 favourite The Hills Have Eyes. Deadly Blessing stars a youthful Sharon Stone (Casino, Basic Instinct, The Quick and the Dead) in her first ever speaking role, alongside Ernest Borgnine (Escape From New York, The Wild Bunch, Marty), Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes, The Devil's Rejects) and Maren Jensen (Battlestar Galactica). The film sees director Craven moving away from the uncompromising ferocity of his first two features and instead focusing on a far more brooding and atmospheric kind of terror, but retains the theme of oppositional family units that was central to The Hills Have Eyes.

In an attempt to distance himself from the strict religious Hittite community in which he was raised - one that rejects all the trappings of modern life - Jim Schmidt (Douglas Barr) has married a headstrong city girl, Martha (Maren Jensen), and left the sect. When Jim is involved in a tragic and highly mysterious accident, the close-knit community shuns Martha leaving her to seek the comfort of two old college friends, Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner), who come to stay with her during her time of mourning. As the three friends begin to unlock the mystery surrounding Jim's death, it becomes apparent there is a diabolical killer in their midst who may be hiding deep within the local God-fearing community.

Fondly remembered by horror fans for its many key set-pieces (particularly one featuring a snake in a bathtub and a terrifying waking-dream sequence involving a very large spider and a wide-open mouth that serves as a notable precursor to Craven's masterful A Nightmare On Elm Street), Deadly Blessing is a tense and thrilling old-school horror film that is ripe for reassessment in an age when horror fans are more-often-than-not simply being bludgeoned into submission by barrages of grisly images served up as entertainment. It also has a mother of a final shot.

The Funhouse marked the return to the big screen of one of the great horror directors of the 1970s, Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - surely you didn't need me to tell you that?) following his acclaimed TV mini-series adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot.

With an opening scene that includes post-modernist nods to both Halloween and Psycho, The Funhouse reworks the classic Old Dark House story when two teenage couples decide to top off an evening spent at a travelling carnival by spending the night in the the fake goblins, skeletons and monsters. But the hi-jinks soon turn into a living nightmare when they witness the murder of the carnival's fortune-teller, Madame Zena (two time Oscar winner Sylvia Miles) at the hands of the showground barker's freakish son, Gunther (Wayne Doba), and find themselves being stalked by a grotesque creature more terrifying than anything the funhouse itself has to offer.

A stylish and pleasingly grotesque horror, The Funhouse has been unavailable in the UK for many years, having been briefly banned on video when it was mistakenly branded a 'video nasty' during that famed period of 80s moral outrage.

Both Deadly Blessing and The Funhouse are coming to UK DVD for the very first time on 29th October, courtesy of Arrow Films at the RRP of £15.99. We don not yet have details of aspect ratios and extra features, but will update the story when we do.