House of Dumb

The OG Fear Factor, NBC’s answer to Survivor back in 2001, was essentially the dawn of toilet television. It was a lousy show hosted by Joe Rogan, but at least it knew what it was: a dumb, stunt-driven game show. People competed against each other in gross, dangerous, or genuinely frightening challenges for a $50,000 prize at the end of each episode. I watched it occasionally. We all did.

This new iteration of Fear Factor, House of Fear, grafts the original show onto Big Brother, and in doing so, strips away the last remaining justification for its existence. A group of contestants live together in a house, compete in Fear Factor-style stunts, and after each episode, someone is eliminated. The last person standing wins $200,000. Assuming a season of at least ten episodes (there are 14 players), that means the total cash outlay has shrunk from half a million dollars to $200,000, despite roughly 25 years of inflation. Cool deal.

Let’s just say that the people willing to humiliate themselves for an entire season for what amounts to a modest down payment are not exactly a casting director’s fantasy. They are mostly awful, flattened into familiar reality-TV archetypes and shoved into a house together to manufacture cheap conflict.

It plays like a bargain-bin 2000s MTV dating show, only with snakes and bugs. Thanks to the editing, every sentence uttered by every contestant sounds like it was pulled from a low-budget reality-show phrasebook: “I’m not here to make friends,” “he put a target on my back,” “I’m not afraid to make enemies,” “at the end of the day,” “it is what it is,” “I trust my gut.” It’s like shaking a Magic 8 Ball labeled “Reality Competition Clichés.”

The premiere stunt vacuum-seals everyone inside giant sheets of plastic wrap. The first two teams to escape get to choose four people to compete in the elimination “end game.” That challenge involves dumping bugs, snakes, rats, birds, and lizards onto contestants while they sift through the writhing pile to find hidden codes.

It is the Ow! My Balls of television. There is no reason to watch it, and I will never watch another episode. It turns fear into something utterly banal and prioritizes alliances, backstabbing, and gameplay over the stunts, which was the only thing the original Fear Factor had going for it. It is not, as one contestant earnestly claims, “Fear Factor on steroids.” It is The Real Housewives of Fear Factor, and it is trash. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it makes Beast Games look like Cube. Johnny Knoxville is better than this.