In an interview with Fango, Eli Roth revealed that he’s in talks to remake Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse. As Roth himself explains to the site, while it’s an entertaining enough film it could definitely be improved upon.
“I’m talking with Universal about that one,” Roth reveals. “THE FUNHOUSE is a movie where the first half is brilliant—they set up these great characters—and then they pay off none of them. You have Marco the Magician sawing his daughter in half, the brothers who run the carnival and the funhouse setting. And then it’s all about this weird mutant thing. It should be about the kids getting killed in horrible ways, put in different contraptions in the funhouse and the final girl being strapped into the ride and sent into the tunnels to be confronted by terrifying tableaux of her dead friends. A smart remake could be so much fun. Kill the kids in fabulous ways and continually reuse the bodies by making them freaks in the freak museum, sew their eyes shut, waxworks… That’s the stuff I want to do in a remake of THE FUNHOUSE.”
Sounds like it could be a ton of fun if done right.
Course, the man’s known for talking about tons of films that get pushed aside, and indeed he’s got more stuff on the way. He’s currently producing Cotton, a film being shot right now in a fake documentary style about a priest who performs fake exorcisms until one day he runs into the real thing.
Then there’s his project Endangered Species, a big budget scifi destruction flick, and Psycho Killer, from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven). Roth told Fango that “…most studios have found it too dark. From the writer of SE7EN, what did they expect? We didn’t think it was dark enough and asked Andrew to rewrite it that way. It’s basically a slasher movie from the killer’s point of view. The first 30 minutes is our maniac subjectively watching his prey, a girl who works in a pharmacy, and then stalking her as she clocks off. Then a female cop suddenly pops into frame… It’s fantastic and intense, and MGM wants to release it.
After seeing the way he got screwed with Hostel Part 2, let’s hope he bounces back in full force. Check Fango’s interview for more from Roth, including what it was like on the set of Inglourious Basterds.