31 Days of Horror 2021 Day 10 Funny Games

 

TITLE-Funny Games (1997)

SOURCE-Bootleg DVD-R

Back the first year I did 31 years of horror here on the blog I covered the 2007 remake of this Michael Hanke film. At the time I had lost my bootleg of the original film. A few weeks ago I was going through a stack of unlabeled dvd-rs off a spindle. So figured today was the perfect time to cover this fairly contraversial film.

A family is headed to their vacation home. It is way out in the woods and on a nice lake. Once they get there we see them preparing a sailboat. And a knife gets dropped in the boat. The camera zooms in on this knife. Setting up something for later in the film.

While the husband is gone 2 young teenage boys come and knock on the door. They tell the wife they were sent by the neighbors to borrow a couple of eggs. These two boys start to act odd and the wife asks them to leave. They refuse. The husband returns and this is when the two teens take the family hostage.

Now this sounds like your standard home invasion movie. And in some ways it is. But Hanke also wanted to make a statement on how we movie viewers enjoy seeing violence as long as at the end the villains get what is coming to them. 

Through out the film one of the teens keeps talking to the camera and addressing the viewers. Like one scene where the son is killed. He mentions how the kid would normally survive in a film like this. Or the scene where the teens leave the house and the one says something along the lines of "We have to give them a chance to escape. That is what is expected." 

Then there is the most famous scene. The mother manages to get the gun the teens are using. She shoots one of the murderous teens. The other one grabs the VCR remote. Hits the rewind button and the film rewinds to back before the mother gets the gun. And this time she doesn't get the gun.

Near the end the two teens take the mother,the only hostage still alive. Tie her up and toss her into the sailboat. They are headed across the lake to the neighbors that were mentioned earlier in the film. The mother sees the knife that was dropped in the boat. It looks like she is gonna get the knife,free herself and kill the teens. But they stop her. Then toss her into the lake.

This is a film that either you love it or you hate it. I get why. Without giving our the movie viewers our cartharsis by having a survivor and the villains getting killed ,well that bothers most people. And Hanke has said he doesn't consider the film a horror movie. For me it is. It has all the tropes ,even if a lot of them got turned upside down,of a horror film.

As far as which is the better film,this one or the remake with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth? For me the original just works better. Something about it not being in English and having to read subtitles makes it feel more cold and cynical to me. 

Funny Games(1997) gets a A-.