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| House of 1,000 Corpses |
| Genre |
Horror/Slasher |
| Director |
Rob Zombie |
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“House of 1,000 Corpses” tries to make up for its lack of humor, creativity, character development, and suspense, with excessive gore. It attempts to be shocking but only succeeds in boring the audience.
Rob Zombie’s musical work harkened back to the glory days of heavy metal. “More Human than the Human” is a pop-metal classic. His stylish videos and stage show would lead one to a believe that a feature length film would be not only gory, but creative and highly entertaining. Sadly this was not the case.
The horror genre has several types of films. The audience often roots for an all powerful villain to kill it’s victims. In franchises like “Friday the 13th” or the “Nightmare On Elm Street” series, they are the stars of the film and we take pleasure in the terror they inflict. Others have well developed characters facing insurmountable evil, like “The Ring”, “The Evil Dead”, or “The Exorcist”. Still others such as “Misery” or “The Blair Witch Project” create a building sense of dread and suspense. “Corpses” has none of these things going for it. All the characters are awful and annoying, there are no obstacles to overcome and almost no suspense is developed.
A group of young people are traveling through a small town on a dark, rainy night. They pull over for gas at a place called Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen. The owner tells the travelers' of the legend of Doctor Satan, a local madman who tried to transform retarded people into a race of super-humans with crude surgery. The owner gives them a map to the location where Doctor Satan's body disappeared after hanging.
On their way to find this location, their car breaks down. They end up at an evil looking house just off the side of the road. As luck would have it, they find a family of deranged murders, cannibals, and psychopaths who enjoying torturing, killing and listening to Lionel Ritchie.
The movie derails fairly quickly. The plot manages to make even less sense than you’d expect, especially at the end, where we meet a number of mutants and victims in an abandoned mine shaft. Zombie’s film isn’t about story, it’s about style, as in the style to freak us out with gore. But it’s too much to handle. Zombie asks us to swallow so much, that by the end we feel like Bon Scott in the back seat of a Cadillac (not that we died by choking on our own vomit, but that we had way too much).
There’s no suspense. No rooting for sympathetic heroes or jeer-shouting villainy. Sure there were a couple of good camera shots, but one can’t help but think that Zombie is a musician who is out of his element in the film world. (How would he like it if Jared Leto or Keanu Reeves tried to break into the music business?)
Worse, Zombie uses a highly irritating editing style. Every sixty seconds or so, the filmmaker edits in bits of grainy snuff film material, 1950s strip show footage, and clips of old horror films (think “Natural Born Killers”).
The film was originally supposed to come out two-and-a-half years ago. Zombie turned his cut in to Universal Pictures. The execs reacted to the level of gore and of violence as if they had seen Ozzy bite the head off a dove, and refused to release the movie. So did MGM/UA. Finally Lion’s Gate released it. Would the world be a better place if they had not?
IS IT WORTH IT? No. This is a film that doesn’t work. All style, no substance. Sucks to your asthmar, Mr. Zombie. D |
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| "We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it." |
- Jack Nicholson
A Few Good Men
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Distributed Beers
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| 5 |
Sierra Nevada Bigfoot |
| 4 |
Guinness Draught |
| 3 |
Newcastle Brown Ale |
| 2 |
Bass Pale Ale |
| 1 |
Samuel Adams Boston Lager |
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