Movie Review: 3 From Hell

3 from Hell *** / *****

Directed by: Rob Zombie.

Written by: Rob Zombie.

Starring: Sheri Moon Zombie (Baby), Bill Moseley (Otis Driftwood), Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding), Jeff Daniel Phillips (Warden Virgil Harper), Richard Brake (Winslow Foxworth Coltrane), Kevin Jackson (Gerard James), Tracey Leigh (Judy Harper), Sylvia Jefferies (Heather Starship Galen), Emilio Rivera (Aquarius), Richard Edson (Carlos Perro), Pancho Moler (Sebastian), Dee Wallace (Greta), Stacie Greenwell (Janice), Anny Rosario (Juanita), David Ury (Travis O'Rourke), Clint Howard (Mr. Baggy Britches), Daniel Roebuck (Morris Green), Wade Williams (Buford Tuttle), Sean Whalen (Burt Willie), Steven Michael Quezada (Diego), Lucinda Jenney (Nebraska), Bill Oberst Jr. (Tony Commando), Jan Hoag (Guard Betty Lou), Dot-Marie Jones (Slackjaw), Nancy Linehan Charles (Dr. Bowman), Austin Stoker (Newscaster Gibson), Emiliano Díez (Rodrigo), Richard Riehle (Sheriff Wolf), Tomas Boykin (Derek Zoom), Alexandra Ella (Tracee Wild), Rob Welsh (Luke Luke), Jackie S. Garcia (Princesa), Flor de Maria Chahua (Bella), Alicia Adams (Poker), Billy Blair (Garbage Man), Mariano 'Big Dawg' Mendoza (Gonzo), Greg Serano (Warlock), Christine Weatherup (Abigail Duck), Christopher B. Duncan (Glassy Wolf), Tom Papa (News Anchor George Glass), Esteban Cueto (Big Cue), Marco Morales (Clutch), Gabriel 'G-Rod' Rodriguez (Shovel), Danny Trejo (Rondo), Matthew Willig (Creep), Amir Abdalla (Sheriff Deputy), Rian Bishop (Sheriff), Chaz Bono (Digby Neville), Duane Whitaker (Dr. Bankhead).

 

For better or worse, Rob Zombie is completely unable to make any kind of film other than a Rob Zombie film. Give me the keys the one of the biggest horror franchises in history – Halloween – and he’ll flip it, spending much more time examining and adding complexity to Michael Myers, instead of his victims – and when he somehow got to make a sequel, he essentially made one about PTSD. Those two films were his only real flirtation with the mainstream – before then, he made the ultra-violent House of 1,000 Corpses (which was re-edited by a nervous studio about the level of gore to the point where you can see the skill Zombie had, but also made the film rather incoherent) and his best film to date – 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects, a quasi-sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses, and one in which Zombie staked out ground as an exciting new voice in horror – as he went completely balls to the walls in the level of violence and blood and dirt and grim – but didn’t really make a torture porn film, which had popular at the time. Since the Halloween movies, Zombie has struggled to get things made – Jason Blum gave him some money to make his most ambitious film, The Lords of Salem, a trippy film that I’m not sure quite added up, and he crowd-funded the awful 31 – a film in which the ultra-rich (so rich, they dress like French aristocrats – watch poor people kill each other for their amusement.

 

For his latest, he’s back in Devil’s Rejects territory – making a sequel to his best film, which was challenging for two reasons – the first being the last time we saw the Rejects they were being gunned down in slow motion as Free Bird played (the single greatest scene in Zombie’s filmography) and two, one of the rejects, Sid Haig, was on death’s door in real life when he shot the film (he died in September). Zombie gets by both problems – first, he gives us a selection of news broadcasts saying the three survived, were on life support for months, and are now in jail. And second, he has Haig’s Captain Spaulding be executed early in the film – but not before he gives Haig a terrific death row monologue – a fitting send-off to the great character actor.

 

From there, it appears like Zombie has tried to cram every film he has wanted to make into one film – as if he wonders if he’ll ever be able to direct a film again. For a while, he has made a women’s prison picture – with Shari Moon Zombie’s Baby at the mercy of a sadistic prison guard (Dee Wallace). He has made a Desperate Hours inspired (the film is actually brought up) in which Otis Driftwood (Bill Mosley) and the new recruit to the rejects – a half-brother – Winslow Foxworth Coltrane (Richard Brake) take the sadistic warden and some staff hostage to get Baby out of prison. After yet another stop over at a seedy motel (Zombie loves violence in seedy hotels) – the trio heads to Mexico, and the film becomes a Rob Zombie remake of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch – with the trio wondering if perhaps they have outlived their time.

 

The film is pure Rob Zombie from beginning the end. There is a ton of over-the-top violence and bloody, it has Shari Moon Zombie acting like a psychopathic giddy school girl, and Mosley waxing political. Zombie is clearly making the film for Trump’s America – the horror of the real world finally catching up to Zombie’s view of the violence and rot in American life. The 3 from Hell are obviously horrible – the murder their way through everyone. And yet, everyone they meet is somehow even worse – they are just as violent, but more selfish, more driven by greed.

 

By design, the film is episodic in a way that makes it feel choppy. It’s almost as if Zombie figured out the scenes and moments he wanted, then worked out the plot of the film later. It isn’t the twisted genius of The Devil’s Rejects – or even Halloween II. Yet, it is still very much a film only Rob Zombie could or would make – with his twisted worldview on display. It’s not a movie that will win him any new fans to be sure – and it’s not likely he’s going to get a mainstream film out of this one. But in a film world this is increasingly corporate, erasing director’s fingerprints and turning films into theme park rides (I like the Marvel films, but sorry Martin Scorsese has a point) – it’s refreshing to see someone go for broke, and stick to his guns. Oddly, the film reminded me of Rick Alverson’s The Mountain – a film I watched recently, and didn’t like at all. I admired Alverson sticking to his nihilistic, completely uncommercial sensibility – I just didn’t think the film he made was very interesting to watch or discuss. Zombie’s film, for all of its flaws, is both.   

Movie Review: 31

31

Directed by: Rob Zombie.

Written by: Rob Zombie.

Starring: Sheri Moon Zombie (Charly), Jeff Daniel Phillips (Roscoe Pepper), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs(Panda Thomas), Meg Foster (Venus Virgo), Kevin Jackson (Levon Wally), Malcolm McDowell (Father Murder), Jane Carr (Sister Serpent), Judy Geeson (Sister Dragon), Richard Brake (Doom-Head), Pancho Moler (Sick-Head), David Ury (Schizo-Head), Lew Temple (Psycho-Head), Torsten Voges (Death-Head), Elizabeth Daily (Sex-Head), Michael 'Red Bone' Alcott (Fat Randy), Esperanza America (Snoopy), Andrea Dora (Trixie), Tracey Walter (Lucky Leo), Ginger Lynn (Cherry Bomb), Daniel Roebuck (Pastor Victor), Devin Sidell  (Georgina), Gabriel Pimentel (Brumaire).

 

It wasn’t that long ago that I thought that Rob Zombie may well become the next great American horror director. Sure, his debut film – House of 1,000 Corpses – was marred by studio interference and Zombie’s own inexperience. Since then though, Zombie’s output has been strong – The Devil’s Rejects (still his best film) was a bloody, dark comedy that took Zombie’s influences and put them in a blender to come up with something wholly unique. When he remade Carpenter’s Halloween, he didn’t try to out Carpenter-Carpenter, but instead put his own odd spin on the film – almost making a biopic for Michael Myers. Halloween II pushed the surreality to an extreme for a studio horror film. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of his last film – The Lords of Salem – it was clearly his most ambitious to date, and I liked that he was pushing himself that far. Admittedly though, his films have never made all that much money – and so the last few years have been a series of starts and stops, and almost films that got pushed back or cancelled. Perhaps that explains why 31 feels so rushed – its Zombie returning to low-budget filmmaking, and putting out a quick and dirty horror film just to get something out there. The film is undeniably his work – it has the dirty aesthetic that makes you want to take a shower and get a tetanus shot after watching it. It’s violent, with a twisted sense of humor, like much of Zombie’s work. It’s cynical almost to the point of nihilism. But it’s also something that none of Zombie’s films before have been – boring. Incredibly, incredibly boring. There is not an original moment in the film – which simply repeats what Zombie has done before with less imagination than ever. While Zombie is often associated with the torture porn films of the mid-2000s, I always thought his films were more thoughtful about violence – or at the very least, less interested in punishing the audience. Not so with 31 – which is simply downright awful.

 

The film focuses on a group of carnies, travelling around the dusty, back roads of America in a van that makes the one from American Honey look clean by comparison – you can sense the stench coming from that vehicle. The five of them end up – through a series of events too dull to recount here – locked in a giant factory like building, where three rich people (Malcolm McDowell is one of them – along with Jane Carr and Judy Geeson) unleash one killer at a time on them – started with a little person, going to a giant, and his nymph sidekick (don’t blame me, I didn’t name the character Sex-Head) – and eventually coming back, as we know they must, to Doom-Head (Richard Brake) – who we see in the opening scene of the film, talking directly to the camera about how he is going to murder you. Did I mention that all of these murderers are dressed like clowns? Not friendly birthday party clowns, but the type of clowns you know have herpes clowns.

 

There is a message somewhere beneath all the carnage in 31. The killer clowns are racists and misogynists and Nazis (yes, they actually wear swastikas) – and the group of carnies is a group of easy friends of different races, who laugh, get high and fuck together, and generally seem to be okay people, even if they are dirty. They are forced into an arena where they can either try to work together and survive – by killing the other side – or let the bad guys win, and have control over everything. Perhaps Zombie was thinking about the election yet-to-come when he made 31 – but that seems to be giving him perhaps too much credit here – the films feels slapped together more than anything else, and as soon as you make people literal zombies, any claim to subtly flies out the window.

 

31 didn’t really work for me, because it lacks the genuine humanity of Zombie’s best films. Yes, I know that sounds odd, giving that he makes violent horror films, but Zombie has always viewed his characters – good and evil – as people (even Michael Myers) – and when he lingers over their deaths, it isn’t to rub your nose in the blood and viscera – it’s to watch a person in their final moments, and reflect on what that means. Here, it’s all just so more blood.

 

Zombie remains a talented filmmaker – and perhaps low budget filmmaking is the way to go from here on out – it gives him the freedom to do what he wants. Yet 31 feels like it’s been slapped together at the last minute – and while Zombie brings his characteristic style to it, there’s something off about it from the beginning. When you’re bored even my Sheri Moon Zombie – Zombie’s wife and muse, who has delivered some genuinely great, wack-a-doo performances (when they started making movies together, she would have played Sex-Head – and she would have been great), you know something is off about a Rob Zombie film.

Movie Review: The Lords of Salem

The Lords of Salem
Directed by:  Rob Zombie.
Written by: Rob Zombie.
Starring: Sheri Moon Zombie (Heidi Hawthorne), Bruce Davison (Francis Matthias), Jeff Daniel Phillips (Herman 'Whitey' Salvador), Judy Geeson (Lacy Doyle), Meg Foster (Margaret Morgan), Patricia Quinn (Megan), Ken Foree (Herman Jackson), Dee Wallace (Sonny), Maria Conchita Alonso (Alice Matthias), Richard Fancy (AJ Kennedy), Andrew Prine (Reverend Jonathan Hawthorne), Michael Berryman (Virgil Magnus), Sid Haig (Dean Magnus).

To me, Rob Zombie represents hope for American horror films. His debut film – House of 1,000 Corpses – was not exactly great; it was taken away from him after all, but contained some great moments. His follow-up The Devil’s Rejects was some sort of warped masterwork of the genre that reminded me of Quentin Tarantino. Than he stepped more into the mainstream, and made the fascinating remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween – which unlike most horror remakes didn’t just want to copy the original. His even stranger Halloween sequel was not exactly brilliant, it was certainly something different. I have faith that at some point, Rob Zombie is going to make one of the best horror films of this era.

But his fifth film, The Lords of Salem, is not that film. It is an interesting film, with a promising setup, and a great lead performance by his wife Sheri Moon Zombie, that pretty much completely flies off the rails in the last act, revealing the answers to its mysteries that turn out to be not all that interesting. Pity, because so much of the film is wonderful.

Moon Zombie stars as Heidi, a late night DJ at a heavy metal radio station alongside Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman (Ken Foree), in Salem, Massachusetts. You get no points for guessing this is a movie about witches, since it is set in Salem, and why else would you set a movie in Salem if it wasn’t about witches, and of course, the opening scene that takes place at the Salem witch trials – although we never actually see a trial, just a lot of burning “witches”. One night, as a guest, they have Francis Matthias (Bruce Davison), who has written a new book at the Salem witch trials, once again “debunking the myth” that any of the women were actually witches. That same night, a strange package arrives containing a vinyl record by a group calling themselves The Lords. Eventually Heidi will put the record on at home – and then on her show – but every time she hears it, something strange happens to her. More than that, I will not reveal – although you can probably guess where the story is going, and you’d probably be more right than wrong in doing so.

Most of The Lords of Salem is Zombie at his most restrained. His films are marked by their ultra-violence, although most of The Lords of Salem contains no violence at all. Instead, Zombie seems to be inspired more by Roman Polanski this time around – and wants to slowly build up suspense, and give his wife the type of role that Mia Farrow played in Rosemary’s Baby or Catherine Deneuve played in Repulsion. The most surprising thing about the movie may well be that Sheri Moon Zombie is more than up to it. She actually delivers an excellent dramatic performance here as Heidi, making her paranoia seem real. Sheri Moon Zombie has always been good in previous movies for her husband – I’ll never forget her truly demented work in The Devil’s Rejects, and she made an excellent white trash mother to Michael Myers in Halloween. But she has never been a subtle actress – because the roles required her to go over the top. Here, playing a lower key role for the most part, she proves she should be working far more than she does.

And her husband proves himself capable of making a horror film more based on suspense than gore. This isn’t to say that The Lords of Salem does not contain scenes of Zombie’s ultra-violence – it does – but for most of its running time, Zombie is more interesting in creating paranoia than anything else. And, for the most part, he succeeds.

But then, the last act hits, and things go to hell. Perhaps Zombie just painted himself into a corner, and found no way out, so he decided to go batshit crazy instead. That’s as good as an explanation as I can come up with, because the final act of the movie seems to have been imported from somewhere else, and quite simply is ridiculous. I admire Zombie for going for broke, but really, he couldn’t come up with anything better than that?

Yet, I still feel Zombie is destined to make a truly great horror film – in fact, after The Lords of Salem, I’m more convinced than ever. Even if The Lords of Salem represents perhaps the most flawed film Zombie has made so far, it still shows growth – still shows Zombie reaching for something different. Maybe next time, he’ll hit the mark.

Movie Review: Halloween II

Halloween II ***
Directed By: Rob Zombie.
Written By: Rob Zombie.
Starring: Scout Taylor-Compton (Laurie Strode), Brad Dourif (Sheriff Lee Brackett), Malcolm McDowell (Dr. Samuel Loomis), Tyler Mane (Michael Myers), Sheri Moon Zombie (Deborah Myers), Chase Wright Vanek (Young Michael), Danielle Harris (Annie Brackett), Margot Kidder (Barbara Collier), Mary Birdsong (Nancy McDonald), Brea Grant (Mya Rockwell).

On the basis of his first three films - House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects and Halloween - I have said to anyone who would listen that Rob Zombie is the best, most original director working in the horror genre in America today - even going as far as comparing him to Quentin Tarantino in the way he mashes up all the previous movies in his chosen genre and comes out with something completely different and unique. If it turns out (and I have a strong suspicion that it will) that I am one of the only critics who sees something worthwhile in Zombie’s new film, Halloween II, I can live with that. Once again, Zombie’s film seems to follow the standard horror sequel plot, but it really does do something wholly unique. Is the premise ridiculous? Yes. But was I drawn in and captivated by every moment of this film? Yes, I was.

In Zombie’s original remake of Halloween, he took the daring step to give the killer - the famed Michael Myers - the full biopic treatment. He looked in Myers past, his childhood, and comes out with a portrait of a confused, messed up, violent kid with a horrible homelife that eventually drives him to murder. While the second half of the film was standard slashed movie fare, Zombie directed it with a rare visual flair, making it truly frightening. When I heard that he was going to make a sequel - something he swore he would not do - that he had run out of original things to do, and that all the sequel would be was yet another slasher movie. I should have more faith in Zombie.

If the original film was about the psychology of Myers himself, the sequel is about what it feels like to be a victim of Myers who actually escaped. Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) was the original target of Myers, and the girl who apparently killed Myers, although his body disappeared and was never found. Now, a year later, Laurie is stricken with guilt and fear about what happened. She now lives with her best friend Annie (Danielle Harris), another victim, and her father the Sheriff (Brad Dourif). She wants to leave the past behind her, but in a small town like Haddonfield, that is just not possible. She is spiraling downward towards her own form of psychosis.

There two other plot threads running through the movie. The first involves Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who in the original series was always the voice of reason, but here is an opportunistic monster, who simply out to make money and cash in on the horror show that others lives have become. The other thread is about Michael slowly making his way back to Haddonfield, killing everyone he comes across along the way. He is egged on my his mother, and his former child self, who he sees explaining to him what has to be done. These scenes verge on the ridiculous, but somehow Zombie keeps control of them. For one thing, Sherri Moon Zombie who plays the mother is at her demented best. She is not as wildly over the top as she was in House of 1,000 Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects, but she is just as messed up, telling Michael what he wants to know - he has to Laurie in order for them all to be a family again.

The murder scenes in Halloween are definitely overkill, yet Zombie does not linger on them as much as many recent horror directors do. He favors longshots, that are haunting in their own way, of Michael stabbing, stomping or hacking people to death. When he stabs people, it’s not in the recent Friday the 13th remake, where one strike does it. Myers pulverizes them into a bloody pulp. It is disturbing in the extreme, but it does not feel exploitive.

Halloween II is not quite the triumph that Zombie’s original remake was. For one thing, having backed himself into a corner with the first film by making Myers into a three dimensional character, he has to now bring it farther. And although I admired the scenes with Myers and his hallucinations, I am not really sure they fit into the rest of the movie. I did like McDowell as the egomanical Loomis a lot more this time around then the first time, but I’m not sure he would do what he does at the end of the film. The real star of the movie is Scout Taylor Compton, who actually does deliver a great performance as “the girl”. If someone had survived an attack by Michael Myers, I kind of think that this is what they would end up like. It is a fascinating, great little performance.

And despite my reservations about the film, I have to say that there is not a moment in it that is not interesting to watch. One thing that is undeniable is that Zombie is a gifted visual filmmaker, making us wallow in the mud, dirt and blood in the film. The characters never seem to be able to get clean in this film. His demented vision in this film keeps things moving along at a brisk pace.

Zombie is still the best horror director working in America today. I cannot wait to see what he does next. In Halloween II, Zombie plays with the audience masterfully. That the film is a little over the top in some aspects, is to be expected. Even with the flaws, I doubt you’ll see a better American horror film this year than this one.