House of 1000 Corpses
July 18, 2004
House of 1000 Corpses
2003
Written & directed by Rob Zombie (real name Robert S. Weinstein)
Starring: Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding, Bill Moseley as Otis, Sheri Moon as Baby, Karen Black as Mother Firefly, and Erin Daniels as Denise Willis
J-Rock's Review:
To make this movie more enjoyable, I strongly recommend 
Ok, so this flick isn't terrible, but I was definitely disappointed. According to my buddy Jim (not to be confused with the ABC sitcom According to John Belushi's Less-Talented Younger Brother), Rob Zombie set out to make a movie that was as screamingly different as possible from Scream and all its clones. Well, Rob succeeded in doing that - but I guess he figured that all he had to do to achieve his goal was take The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, make it look like an acid trip, add loud music, and intercut annoying musical sequences.
Don't get me wrong - I love murder, dismemberment, depravity and gore as much as anybody, and this movie's got all of them, and in abundance. But there are certain aspects of the movie that are pretty annoying and/or dumb, and thus detract from the overall experience.
First off, the characters are just too over the top. I know this movie is supposed to be surreal, but the cannibal-murderer family was just too fucking ridiculous, bordering on campiness.
Baby
Image stolen from, I mean courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Baby - played by Rob's unbelievably hot wife Sheri Moon - is a necro-nymphomaniac who gets her rocks off by killing and whatnot. She also has a high-pitched laugh that makes you want to put a lawn dart through your eardrum - and she does cackles endlessly throughout the movie.
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Otis
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Otis - a skinny redneck-type guy who wears a cowboy hat and kills people. And yells a lot. Sort of like Kid Rock, except for the killing (as far as we know). And oh yeah, he reads weird tirades to his bound & gagged captives. And he shoots a cop. And he's kind of stupid and annoying - I mean, what's the point of his long-winded speeches and bullshit - get to the killing!! He's at his best when he carves up the first victim and fuses the torso to a fake fish-looking bottom to create "Fish-Boy"!
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
The Mother
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Mother Firefly - the dirty, skanky, yellow-toothed matriarch. She also shoots a cop. Pretty pointless.
Grandpa
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Grandpa - he was in the movie for about 5 minutes, and what a ridiculous five minutes they were. He gets up on a stage in the weirdos' house and does some sort of stand-up routine which freaks out the four kids who got stranded there. Unfortunately, the friggin' music and sound effects were so loud, you can't make out anything he's saying. Which actually might not be a bad thing. Or it doesn't matter at all. Whatever.
And then there's the story - it's pretty good up until a point. The first 15 minutes are all set-up - these four kids are driving cross-country, documenting weird roadside attractions, and they stop for gas at "Captain Spaulding's House of Horror and Stuff" (I'll check that name again).
Image courtesy www.houseof1000corpses.com
Captain Spaulding is the surly, clown-faced proprietor of this place, and he's assembled a collection of oddities and horror paraphernalia. The store also has a little horror ride featuring some famed serial killers, including the local legend "Doctor Satan", who allegedly experimented on his mentally retarded patients in an attempt to create super-human killing machines.
Jimmy - the Lois Lane of the group - wants to see the tree where Dr. Satan was supposedly hanged, so they drive off to find it. Along the way, it starts raining. Doesn't that always happen? Then someone shoots out one of their tires with a shotgun, stranding them on the side of the road.
Oh yeah, this takes place in 1973, so there are no cell phones. Finland wasn't around to invent them yet.
Oh yeah, they picked up Baby, who was hitchhiking. When they get the flat, she of course brings them to her house, which is just up the road.
So they get there, and the ridiculousness begins. There's also a giant guy in the family named Tiny. Tiny, get it? Because he's actually huge. The irony is killing me.
While the rest of the family "entertains" the scared kids, Otis is upstairs torturing some cheerleaders. By torturing, I mean screaming some weird philosophical bullshit at them while they squirm and cry. I was almost begging for someone to kill me, too.
The flat tire gets fixed by another family member wearing a bear skin on his head, and the kids get in the car to leave. They head down the driveway, and then the driver gets out to open the gate. Did I mention that he stops the car about 100 yards before the gate, so he has to walk the rest of the way in the open? You know what happens next. How could you not - they practically hit you in the face with it.
Yeah, so the family attacks them all and kidnaps them. Now the annoying stuff begins - Denise (I think that's her name) is tied up and forced to spend time with Otis. She asks where Bill is, and Otis shows her - he's now Fish-Boy!
Meanwhile, somewhere else, the father of one of the missing kids calls the cops and a search begins. The cops and the father trace the kids' journey to Captain Spaulding's place, then to the house. Then they all die.
Ok, so now you think the torture, dismemberment, depravity and possible sexual misbehaviors begin, right?
WRONG.
Instead of doing something remotely entertaining, the script-I mean the family-brings the three remaining captives to a huge well in the middle of a field; according to Otis, they're taking them to see Dr. Satan. Did I mention that the victims are now dressed in fluffy bunny suits? Yeah.
One girl makes a break for it, but instead of booking into the woods and covering herself in leaves and moss, Green Beret-style, she runs in a straight line, until Baby overtakes her and stabs her to death, cackling the whole time. One down, 2 to go.
The other two are shoved into an huge casket, which is then lowered into the pit and left hanging halfway down. The doors are closed, and then Otis also lowers a lantern and a cassette player, which is playing a tape of some garbled moaning or chanting. Or Satanic curses. Or quiche recipes. I don't know.
As the girl tries to revive the guy with her in the coffin, some zombies or dead people or demons or union plumbers come out of the muck, rip open the coffin, grab Jimmy, and take him away screaming. The girl climbs out of the coffin and walks into a tunnel in the side of the well. There's some creepy old guy there who's also in a bunny suit. She keeps looking for a way out, but ends up in some sort of lab. That's right, she found Doctor Satan, hard at work on Jimmy's brain.
Doctor Satan totally killed the movie for me. Instead of being some sicko in a bloody lab coat or a member of the family, he looks like something out of Hellraiser, or a McFarlane horror sculpture. I wish (again) that I had screen-grabs. Dr. Satan is all dried out and gray, and he has his instruments coming out of his arms. Even more ridiculous is his main creation, a huge juicy red half-robot guy with goggles for eyes and an axe.
This guy chases Denise through the tunnels, and when he corners her, she ducks and he chops through a support, bringing the tunnel down on his head. Before he dies, he takes off his facemask just to ooze some green shit out of his mouth/nose-hole. Fantastic.
Denise wakes up the next day and climbs out of the hole. She gets to the road and starts stumbling along, desperately in need of a shower and some Doritos. A car comes along and stops for her. Guess who's driving. No seriously, take one fucking guess.
It's Captain Spaulding of course! So she gets in the car and says she needs to get to a doctor. He says he'll take her to a doctor. This foreshadowing is just so suspenseful. No wait, I already knew what was going to happen.
So yeah, Otis of course pops up from the back seat. And then we have a quick montage of Denise screaming and a few shots of Dr. Satan.
And then we get the old classic, "The End?"
Sigh...Ok, so granted that Robbie admittedly borrowed heavily from TCM, the cannibal-killer-whacko family was pretty routine. He could've at least made them a little less annoying and even a shred more believable. And Doctor Satan was just laughable - sort of a cross between a Cenobite and Joan Rivers.
I know all the Rob Zombie fanboys out there get a hard-on from this movie, but to me it seems like Rob was more concerned with the look of the movie and including his songs and little music videos than with making the movie a little less ridiculous.
Oh yeah, there's a sequel called The Devil's Rejects. I might review that, too, if I can stand another 90 minutes of Baby's inhuman shrieking.
