Funny as in Hysterical as in Uncontrolable and Crazy

There was a movie trailer a while back that, at least to me, looked pretty cool. It was about two white-clad maybe-brothers who bust into a family's house and torture them. This sounds really cool to me, as I like movies of this kind. Of course, I don't go see many movies in theaters so I forgot about it, and then last week when I was at the mall with my friends who randomly brought up this trailer, I got kind of obsessed with finding out what the hell it was called. Everyone thought I was talking about The Strangers. It wasn't, obviously. Finally, my friend Josh reminded me that Tim Roth was in it. With the help of IMDB, it was easy to find after that.

Funny Games (2008) is apparently a near shot-for-shot remake of an Austrian movie from 1997. Hell if I knew, I just thought the trailer was cool enough to blow $20 on the DVD. My new roommates had moved in that same day, so we grabbed some drinks and sat down to watch what has garnered some very good and very bad reviews. Now, we had all been familiar with the title through previews and thought that it looked like a dark comedy. When the box hailed it as a "The most terrifying movie I've ever seen!" (Peter Eisenman, ICON) we were a little confused. But whatever, we all like horror movies, and we were even flipping through the movie channels and watching the abortion that was Saw IV for a while, so we obviously can handle gore. We didn't get anything we expected.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke who also wrote and directed the original is the person to thank for this movie. It opens with a fantastically directed cut-to-cut sequence of a family playing a pretentious game of "Name That Classical Music Piece" right before your ears and eyes are raped by Naked City's Bonehead and the title and opening credits are blasted across the happy family's faces in blaring red letters. This is where the tension starts.

Not long after the family gets to their vacation home, two similar looking polite guys in sterile white shirts, gloves, and golf shorts start acting very oddly. And this is the part where I love what happens: the tension builds until someone takes a golf club to the kneecap--but you don't actually see the golf club making contact. Nor do you see any of the brutality throughout the whole movie (save for one spoiler-ific moment, so I'm not writing it, but it's balls-tight). As my new roommate Nick said, it's like the best porn you've ever seen that has absolutely no nudity.

There really isn't too much I can say about the movie without giving everything away, other than the fact that the gore is kept to an absolute minimum, the directing is fantastic, the writing can't be beat, and even the character who keeps addressing the audience adds to the tension. And my god--the tension! The tension is so uncomfortable to sit through it's near unbearable. It is terrifying to sit through, and yes--I would say that it kills a little piece of you to sit through it all. But it is amazing and you owe it to yourself if you're a fan of horror whatsoever.

-Evan "Dez" O'Connor