House of 1000 Corpses is a manic, acid trip of a horror film and an absolute love letter to the video nasties craze of the mid seventies and eighties. Having watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 recently you can really see the influence it had on this film, from its dreamlike, nightmarish oversaturated lighting to its colourfully insane characters, it is almost like Rob Zombie was intentionally trying to make a spiritual successor to the offbeat and unusual Tobe Hooper movie.
It even stars Bill Mosely who played Chop Top in the aforementioned cult sequel in a very similar role as Otis Firefly.
The setup for the story is essentially the same as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a group of friends happen across an insane family in the middle of nowhere where the only thing they can hope for is a quick death, except this time around it has a carnivalesque twist to it.
There's a lot of black humour in House of 1000 corpses but underneath it is a nasty mean spirited exploitation horror film. It balances the two very well even as it gets progressively more absurd as the film goes on.
My only criticism is that it uses a lot of B roll footage spliced into the movie and frequently uses different coloured filters, which does give it a unique style however I think it detracts from the overall experience just a little, this creative choice reminds me a lot of Oliver Stone's natural born killers, another film I really enjoy that is only mildly held back by the directors overzealous creativity with the camera.
Overall though House of 1000 corpses is a blast.
The Devil's Rejects is Rob Zombie's best film. It follows the firefly family directly from the end of the first movie as they attempt to flee from the police after a raid at their farm-house of horrors. While it's a throwback to the brutal exploitation films of the 1970's it has its own unique fingerprint that is un-mistakingly Rob Zombie. The traditional shots are artful, its 1970's rock soundtrack is excellent and every character is larger than life and unusual as hell, the film is perfectly paced and it masterfully balances dark humour with horrific violence.
Like Natural Born Killers the story is told through the eyes of the antagonists and this will either completely work for you or it won't. Now while I can't say I empathise with the killers, because they do some truly horrific things in this movie but they are so charismatic it is impossible for me to hate watching them, they are iconic horror villains. They're not anti-heroes, not by any stretch of the imagination but there are moments that almost endear you to them as a family.
One in particular involves the gang going out for ice cream in the midst of all the carnage, it's a brief moment of levity between the family of psychopaths that is so oddly wholesome it is endearing.
There is literally nothing bad I can say about this film, the Devil's Rejects is a huge upgrade on House Of 1000 corpses and it only gets better until it ends with a bang.
3 from Hell is a very disappointing final chapter to the series. The good moments it has are few and far between and are all in the first two acts of the film. The opening is exactly what I wanted from a Devil's Rejects sequel, if there had to be one. While admittedly it's unrealistic that the firefly family would have survived their wounds from the last movie, as it is not a series that demands realism going in I was ok with that.
Seeing the gang on trial and in prison was enough to bring me around to the idea that it was worthwhile to bring them back but the story is a complete mess. There are some good ideas here and there but they are never capitalised on.
It's hinted that their time in prison has changed them, it's implied that Otis has become more mellow in his old age and Baby has gone deeper into insanity through her isolation in solitary for ten years, a really cool idea and I was looking forward to seeing how it would play out but then it's literally dropped as soon as it's brought up.
I think it's clear that the film suffered both from the death of Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding) and Rob Zombie not being able to obtain a bigger budget. It feels like the original story intended for the sequel was massively altered to accommodate for his passing, he is in the film, briefly in the opening, which would explain why the first act and the rest of the film are like two entirely different movies.
It begins as a faux documentary acting as a direct follow up to The Devil's Rejects, in the middle it decides its a home invasion film and by the end for some reason morphs into an amateur grindhouse version of a spaghetti western.
The film completely falls apart by the third act, when the trio decide to go to Mexico for seemingly no reason whatsoever and are then hunted by the cartel. At this point the film had completely lost me and I was bored waiting for it to finish.
Alongside the issues the movie has with its story, it suffers from a serious downgrade in its production value. It looks noticeably cheaper and there are some truly terrible editing choices.
There's a particular murder sequence that is a complete and utter hack job, the scenes are edited together out of order and not for any discernible reason. The editor needed to be fired they're so bad.
Lastly while the characters are not completely ruined, their portrayals are objectively weaker than the first two instalments. Unlike some I really enjoyed Sheri Moon Zombie as Baby in the first two films but here her acting is forced, showing that there's a difference between chewing the scenery and eating it whole.
It's a real disappointment.
Add comment
Comments