(2003)
Reviewed by Michael Bolvary
Written and Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, Karen Black, Chris Hardwick, Rainn Wilson, Erin Daniels, Jennifer Jostyn, Matthew McGrory, Robert Mukes, Dennis Fimple
Hey Rob,
What's up? First off, I gotta tell you what a huge fan I am of your music; anyone who names his rock band after one of my favourite old horror movies (White Zombie) is A-OK in my book. Like you, I'm a major trash horror movie fan, and I love the way you pay "homage" to cult films in your songs, in everything from samples of dialogue to the titles, like "More Human Than Human" (a line from Blade Runner). As a rock star, your music got even better went you went solo in 1998 with Hellbilly Deluxe, one of my favourite metal albums of all time--the infectious melodies of "Superbeast", "Dragula" (an homage to Hermann Munster's coffin-car! I love it!) and "Living Dead Girl" (one of Jean Rollin's best movies) make it an instant classic.
Along with your taste in music and cinema, I agree with your opinion on the sorry state of the horror genre in recent years. You said, and I quote, "Nothing seems scary anymore.... I want to like the new stuff, but it's always crap. It seems as if anything made after 1985 is hopeless." My feelings exactly. The Scream films were the worst: "I hate that shit with a passion," you said. "It's a bunch of teeny-bopper crap designed to sell more tacos at Taco Bell.... It's like a two-hour episode of Party of Five except someone gets fucking stabbed." I couldn't have put it better myself.
Why don't they make horror films the good old-fashioned way, like they did during the gory glory days of the 1970s? What happened to the raw power, the freshness, vitality and originality of the fright films of that bygone era? Isn't there anyone who wants to make horror films the way they used to be made? Well, if you want to do something, you gotta do it yourself. When I learned that you were going to write and direct your own horror movie, it seemed like the best thing to happen to the genre in ages. You gave it a great, schlocky, trashy title, assembled a cast that only a cult horror fan would want and went out there and made your own little monster of a movie: House of 1000 Corpses. I could hardly wait to see it.
But I would have to wait--along with all of your other fans who wanted so desperately to see your macabre masterpiece. You would also have to wait--for the film to find a distributor after Universal refused to release it. United Artists also wanted nothing to do with it, and my immediate feeling was: this movie will never be seen theatrically; it'll go direct to video. But your House was finally bought by Lions Gate Entertainment, and I can't tell you how relieved I felt. In April of 2003, nearly three full years after it had been shot, the world got to enter the House of 1000 Corpses--at last, here was Rob's zombie movie!
I suppose all my eager, obsessive anticipation heightened my expectations for the film to such a high point that nothing could have lived up to it. Walking out of the theatre after it was over, I thought to myself: it wasn't bad ... a few memorable scenes ... definitely different from the usual crap they make these days--but not the revisionist horror masterpiece that it had been made out to be. It was cool, but it wasn't that great.
Now, after watching the film a few more times on DVD, my feelings are somewhat different. House of 1000 Corpses definitely grew on me, and now, Rob, I can honestly say that I think your film rocks. Here's why:
You cut your filmmaking teeth by directing the music videos for several of your own songs (I particularly liked your videos for "Never Gonna Stop (The Red Red Kroovy)", which is all done in brilliant homage to A Clockwork Orange, and "The Living Dead Girl", which is fashioned after the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Naturally, you brought that same manic sensibility to this feature film: the frantic editing, wild camerawork, colour-saturated visuals, negative printing--all combined with the blaring soundtrack you composed with Scott Humphrey--made your movie an audiovisual feast.
You elicited some great performances from your all-cult-star cast: Bill Moseley (playing his most manic character since Chop-Top in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Sid Haig, Sheri Moon (congratulations on marrying such a hot chick!), Dennis Fimple, Robert Mukes, Karen Black and especially the 7-foot Matthew McGrory (as "Tiny") all got their best roles in years as the members of a deranged family living in an isolated farmhouse who set their sadistic sights on a bunch of kids on Halloween night, 1977. While the characters are definitely demented, they come across as a bit too flamboyant and overplayed to match the scary, believable intensity of the crazy families in, say, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. Instead, they act like they belong in a low-rent knock-off like Motel Hell or Mother's Day. Maybe that was the intention....
Anyway, the villains were clearly the central characters, as all the heroes (?) in the film didn't produce much of an impact. As four kids driving around the American countryside researching bizarre attractions, Rainn Wilson, Erin Daniels, Jennifer Jostyn and Chris Hardwick made their characters interesting only occasionally (though they appeared genuinely scared during some of the torture and murder scenes). Thanks for employing older actors in the victim roles--these days, I'm so sick of seeing young teenagers cast as victims, because it's such a pandering attempt to appeal to the junior high school audience in horror films.
A lot of Wayne Toth's grisly makeup effects inevitably had to be cut out to get the all-important R rating (any chance of re-editing them back into a director's cut, Rob?), but a few scenes still made a definite impression. I especially liked seeing the main villains of the film, Dr. Satan, and his henchman, the Professor, at the end--the scene of Chris Hardwick getting scalped and undergoing open-chest surgery was a great stomach-turner.
The bizarre production design by Gregg Gibbs (who plays Dr. Wolfenstein, the "Ghost Host" of the TV horror channel), made just about every scene stand out. You made the exterior set from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas look like the best creepy farmhouse in horror, with the jumbled, messy rooms practically reeking of stench and decay. Particularly amazing was the underground cavern that Erin Daniels finds herself trapped in at the end--all black and blue, with skeletons hanging from the walls and ceiling, it reminded me of the cavern at the conclusion of Fulci's Gates of Hell (City of the Living Dead). Was it a conscious homage? Either way, my sincerest congratulations--it looked great!
Since your film was obviously such a labour of love, Rob, it's hard for me to go into the weaker elements here, but I have to get them off my chest. In plain words, you tried too hard to make this so wildly different from most contemporary fright films. For starters, your film is a bit too stylized for its own good: The jackhammer editing, along with too much negative printing and slow motion--combined with the multilayered soundtrack--made many sequences unnecessarily jarring and confusing. (I felt particularly lost during the "Murder Ride" scene; as Sid Haig takes the kids on a carnival-styled haunted house ride, going past displays inspired by various serial killers, his story about the legend of Dr. Satan was edited and mixed so chaotically that I couldn't follow it the first time through.) Also, the rapid-fire inserts shot on grainy super-8 film and videotape looked and felt too cliched and contrived to be disturbing or effective. In attempting to be different and distinctive, you ended up making your movie too offbeat to be really scary or frightening, Rob. However, I loved the sequence where you played the old country song "I Remember You" to the slow motion scenes of Karen Black and Bill Moseley shooting the cops who came to the house to find the kids. At the end of the song, when we hear nothing but dead silence as Bill points his gun straight at the kneeling cop for almost a solid minute before blowing him away, I felt my heart in my mouth for the first time in a long time.
Only in the last twenty minutes or so does the film get really good, as the family traps Erin and Chris in a coffin and lowers them into an underground pit; I love the way they throw down a tape recorder running low on batteries so that the words "Bury me in an unmarked grave" sound creepier and creepier the slower it rolls.
Well, Rob, while I'm sorry that House of 1000 Corpses didn't add up to more, you definitely gave the horror genre something it hadn't seen in quite a while, and although the film wasn't completely successful, I found myself strangely attracted to it. It's the manic energy, the offbeat tone, the over-the-top script, the couple of genuinely scary and shocking parts and the overall deranged energy of the whole thing that made it memorable. Thanks for the movie, Rob. I'll definitely watch it several more times--always dancing around and lip-synching to your amazing cover of the Commodores' "Brick House" over the end credits--while eagerly awaiting your proposed sequel (House of 2000 Corpses?). Till then, so long.
P.S.
I know you personally oversaw the production of the Lions Gate DVD release of your film, and you did a great job, Rob. Sound and picture quality are both impecccable, with not a single misplaced grain in the print, even in the darker sequences. Your commentary was surprsingly informative and insightful, though I was expecting to hear you complain at length about the problems you had getting the film released. It didn't surprise me to learn that you shot all the grainy video inserts yourself, as they have that special manic finesse that only you would have the guts to create. Thanks for pointing out your blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo near the beginning, as the guy smashing pumpkins with Gregg Gibbs. One problem, though: how could you call the kids in the movie "geeks"?! You're probably a bigger horror "geek" than any of them!
The character-introduced menus were definitely a winner--seeing Sid Haig, Bill Moseley and Sheri Moon talk and talk and talk to us as we try to decide which option to choose was something I'd never seen in a DVD before; it was great fun, though they all got pissed off really fast. The rest of the extras--the interviews with the cast and with Wayne Toth, the Behind the Scenes footage, the Casting and Rehearsal clips--were somewhat disappointing because they weren't anywhere near as in-depth as they could and should have been. All the bonus features add up to all of 30 minutes of material (10 minutes of interviews, 10 minutes of rehearsals, while we get a pathetic 2.5 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, all so randomly edited that they might as well have not been there). I was really looking forward to those features, and what did I get? Disappointment.
And what was up with the "Tiny Fucked a Stump" segment? Bill, Sid and Sheri are all standing around telling lame knock-knock jokes that all end with "Tiny fucked a stump!" I guess you just had to be there....
STORY: 3.5 bitch-slaps
PICTURE/AUDIO: 5 bitch-slaps
EXTRAS: 3 bitch-slaps
OVERALL: 4 bitch-slaps
