La casa de los 1000 cadáveres

I already had a user comment for "House of a 1.000 Corpses" submitted here on this site, dated over a year ago and…um…not very praising. In fact, my first viewing of this film was so disappointing that I excessively discouraged other people here to see it. Rather than to simply ignore the old comment and pretend I never bashed it, I wish to write a new – more positive – review, if it were only to convince other people (who also disliked at first) to give it a second change. Several factors (like the praising reviews on "The Devil's Rejects"-sequel and conversations with fellow horror fans) nearly forced me to re-watch "House of a 1.000 Corpses" and I'm glad I did. This truly is a film that requires multiple viewing before one can properly judge it. Rob Zombie's style is often innovating and so overwhelming that it might look overly hectic at first but, in reality, his dedication towards obscurity and his knowledge on classic cinema is one of the best things that could ever happen to the horror genre. And that is something you (or at least I) have to discover with repeated viewings…

The power of this film lies in the fact that the screenplay covers all kind of successful horror premises. Serial killers, mad doctors, a family of crazies, deranged clowns, devil-worshipers….you name the type of terror and "House of a 1.000 Corpses" features it! This movie is a small revival of the entire horror genre all by itself. No extended and boring intros or pointless red herrings in this film, "House…" is straightforward and surefooted sickness from start to finish and you're given almost no time to breathe. Some of the sequences in this film are so damn close to brilliant that I can't possibly figure out why I didn't love them right away!! The execution-scene guided by the moody "I Remember You"-song, for example, is amazingly atmospheric and quite unsettling. Although Rob Zombie's directing skills are still open for improvement (the abrupt climax, overly rough editing), his debut is a staggering gorefest that every horror fan has to experience…repeatedly! Bring on the sequel…I'm ready now!!

Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) is a foul-mouthed clown owner of the "Museum of Monsters and Madmen" and "Fried Chicken and Gasoline". On October 30, 1977, Spaulding shoots a bunch of holdup guys. Jerry Goldsmith (Chris Hardwick), Bill Hudley (Rainn Wilson), Mary Knowles (Jennifer Jostyn), and Denise Willis (Erin Daniels) are traveling the country investigating weirdness. Spaulding shows the group his roadside show and tells them about Dr. Satan. They go in search of the hanging tree where they hanged Dr. Satan. They pick up hitchhiker Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie). Their tires get popped and they end up with Baby's family.

I like directer Rob Zombie's weird outsider style. It's over-stylized Grindhouse. I just think that writer Rob Zombie needs help pulling all the craziness together into a coherent compelling plot. He needs to figure out rooting interest, and how to create tension. This is a bit of a mess but it's a fascinating mess.

Set one day before Halloween in 1977, four friends Bill (Rainn Wilson), Mary (Jennifer Jostyn), Denise (Erin Daniels), and Jerry (Chris Hardwick) stop at a roadside attraction run by the eccentric Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) whose rest stop doubles as a museum of macabre oddities. The group goes through the attractions "Murder Tour" featuring attractions based on the likes of Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Lizzie Borden, and mad doctor known as "Dr. Satan" who was supposedly hanged not too far from the attraction and his body never found. At the suggestion of Jerry, the group heads off to find the tree from which Dr. Satan was hanged and along the way pick up a hitchhiker (Sheri Moon Zombie). When their car gets a flat tire, the group head to the Hitchhiker's home, but soon find themselves in a Hellish nightmare as they find themselves the unwilling guests of the deranged Firefly family.

During the 1990s, musician Rob Zombie rose in popularity and his albums and music videos such as Hellbilly Deluxe and Living Dead Girl and Superbeast were greatly influenced by classic horror fans of which Zombie was a fan. With Zombie contributing to films such as the animated hallucination sequence in Beavis & Butt-Head Do America as well as contributing to the soundtrack of The Crow: City of Angels, Zombie sought to move into feature directing with his initial planned film, a third Crow movie titled The Crow: 2037, unfortunately falling apart before being greenlit. During Zombie's designing of a maze attraction for Universal Studios that was instrumental in reviving the Halloween Horror Nights, the pitch for House of 1,000 Corpses came to Zombie who presented the pitch to executives who responded positively to the idea and allowed production in May of 2000. After the film was completed, Universal got cold feet and feared the film would receive an NC-17 rating which wound up shelving the film for several months. Zombie later bought the distribution rights from Universal and attempted to find distribution elsewhere with little success including MGM who initially agreed to release it for an October 2002 release but bailed following a dispute with Zombie. Zombie even toyed with the idea of releasing the film himself independently, but this was made moot as Lions Gate Films agreed to distribute the film in 2003 as they were looking for more potential appealing genre titles to allow their company to go more ambitious. The film did well enough with Lions Gate that the studio made back their investment and even approached Zombie about the possibility of a sequel. Critical reception upon release was mostly negative, but the film has found reappraisal in subsequent years. For me however there's parts I admire about the film, but it never quite comes together as a whole.

When watching House of 1,000 Corpses from the first frame you think only one thing: "Halloween". From Captain Spaulding's macabre roadside attraction to the Firefly homestead and the freaks with which it's infested, House of 1,000 Corpses feels like "Halloween" in that it's like an elaborate haunted house attraction. While the marketing at the time amped up the intensity and gore present in the film, that stuff is in the movie but this really isn't a "scary" horror film and it's more in line with something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or Motel Hell where it's more a black comedy about killer hillbillies than it is a horror film about them. The main group of kids we follow are unfortunately pretty bland (Zombie even admitted as much by saying "nobody cares about the kids") and most of the personality comes from the Firefly family with Karen Black quite enjoyable as Mother Firefly, Sheri Moon Zombie energetically over the top as Baby, or Texas Chainsaw 2 alum Bill Moseley playing Otis who proudly recycles his mannerisms as Chop Top.

While the movie knows what it is and wears it with pride, the style the movie presents itself with is equal parts its biggest asset and its biggest weakness. At first when the movie began I was digging the style on display with Zombie's creation of a pseudo 1970s grindhouse film with his eye he used for his horror themed music videos, but while the style is initially welcome, it is the sort of thing that works better with a music video than a movie because after a while the style is so in your face that it ceases being novel and becomes more distracting. The movie also puts more focus on the aesthetics than anything else in the movie so the characters who aren't Captain Spaulding or the Firefly clan don't get to do all that much to make an impact so there's not much investment in these characters in whether they live or die. Even in something comedic like this you need to make your audience care about the characters which is the reason why films like Texas Chainsaw 2 or Motel Hell were able to work where this film really doesn't.

House of 1,000 Corpses clearly lives and breathes Halloween from its backwoods premise to its grindhouse aesthetics evocative of many a drive-in 70s splatterfest, but the movie isn't funny enough, smart enough, or even scary enough for me to recommend it. If I ever want to watch a movie like this I'll probably be more likely to pop in Motel Hell or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 because those films just did more to make me care than House of 1,000 Corpses did. Stylistically there's a lot to admire here and horror fans might find it worth a one time watch just for the sake of indulging all the references and easter eggs, but for me it's a miss but not an egregious miss.

This movie is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If you've seen that, you've seen this. I don't need to explain the plot; that's all you need to know. It's TTCM with bizarre attempts at stylization. The victims are characterless twats, except for Rainn Wilson, who plays a lovable nerd. Other than him, the real stars are the family and Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding, but the two psycho women are both horribly annoying. It does break away from the basic formula for the third act of the movie, but I can't say it was for the movies benefit.

The stylization is the worst part of it; randomly cutting to 16mm film clips, random colored lighting that change in between shots, and a bunch of flashing quick cuts. If your over the age of 16, and/or are a seasoned horror fan, this movie is much more likely to give you a headache rather than scare you.

Pros- Sid Haig, nostalgic premise, and some decent gore

Cons- awful attempts at stylization, annoying characters, a twist that makes the movie worse.

If you're gonna watch it; you're gonna watch it. But don't expect anything too much.

Now, let's not get carried away here: is this the best horror flick ever? Not that I've seen. Does it sometimes trip over the fine line between scares and laughs? Sure. Will it remind people of certain other movies? Probably. But bottom line, is this movie a blast? Absolutely.

Writer/director Rob Zombie's music has always had a kind of comic book/horror movie sensibility which he translates into his screen project, a tribute to the pioneering take-no-prisoners classics of the 1970's like "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," in fact a prominent role is played by Bill Moseley of "TCM II." We're informed at the outset that it's Halloween Eve 1977 in some one-horse town in an unspecified region of the country (which of course allows each actor to use any accent he or she likes, even within the same household). The chief attraction of this town seems to be a "horror museum" run by a Captain Spaulding (who bears no resemblance to Groucho Marx) played by veteran B-movie stalwart Sid Haig, whom I recall from way the hell back in "Busting" as the big menacing bald guy. He's still big and bald but not so much menacing as jovially deranged with undercurrents of menace (and lots of make-up). After a delightfully overwritten robbery sequence involving a couple of local yokels, four fresh-faced young people with one foot in the grave show up at the museum, setting in motion a series of unpleasant events.

No particular reason to dwell on the plot, especially if you've seen "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and/or it's sequels. It's the tried-and-true damsels (and their boyfriends) in distress. (We even get a pack of cheerleaders thrown in as a bonus. Apparently people have been going missing in this town but back in the Seventies the term "serial killer" was waiting to be invented, so no squads of Feds and profilers have arrived.) For movies like this to work, the actors have to be on the same page in tone; aside from Haig and Moseley I barely knew anyone except Walt Goggins from TV's "The Shield" and of course Karen Black, whose performance is the only one that doesn't quite click. It's like she's playing a whack job where the others are just being whack jobs. (But if they ever wanted to remake "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," there's your girl!) In terms of direction, Zombie takes a kind of kitchen-sink approach; some of it reminded me of Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" and others of that ilk, with the eye-blink jumping to and from videotape, color variations, flashback and/or fantasy, etc. Some of the editing's a little too jumbled in the modern trend of trying to obscure what's happening, although not to the "Darkness Falls" degree of complete chaos. (I'm old-fashioned, I still think the best way to scare you with something in a movie is just train the camera on it so you can see it coming at you with no way to escape.) But Mr. Zombie has a nice feel for where to put the camera and how to move a scene along. Some of his sequences have a kind of sinister poetry to them, like when the two deputies go checking out the homestead from hell, the kind of setup we've seen in how many shlock items (I just saw one in a recent victim of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew) but in this case Zombie replaces all sound with a Slim Whitman tune (we recall how Whitman's voice was enough to slay big-brained Martians a while back) and holds the final crane shot an audaciously long time. Then once the coffin gets lowered into the water towards the end, "House" kicks into overdrive and from then on if there's nothing in the movie that spooks you, then maybe you're unspookable. I know a lot of that imagery will be lingering with me for a while, such as Fish Boy.....

Ordinarily I try to ignore a movie's external circumstances and go by what's on the screen in front of me but in this case it's pointless to pretend this movie has not been in limbo for three years due to it's supposedly violent content. I've read it had to be cut to make the R rating, although I really can't see how an NC-17 would've hurt it; people will go see it partly because it's by Rob Zombie and it's said to be gory and for those put off by such factors, an R rating won't make them less put off. "Hey, honey, it's an R now--forget the babysitter, let's bring the kids!" I've also read Zombie was satisfied with the released version. As released, there's really nothing there you haven't seen before in some form or other; some gore fans may even feel let down, but of course there's always the DVD. I think that had it been released as made three years ago without all the hype, with the chance to "sneak up on" us, it would've been even more effective. But maybe that's what the studio feared? Well, Mr. Movie Mogul, if you're going to commission the guy from White Zombie to do a horror flick, what exactly do you anticipate as a result? Please either defecate or get off the toilet....

Hard to nail down a favorite moment with this one, but it's hard to resist picking the youngsters getting abused in their bunny suits. It's visually striking, it's unusual, it's blackly funny and also somewhat unsettling the more you think about it. When we watch a horror flick, what exactly are we anticipating? Is the one-sided nature of the conflict (overwhelming villain, hapless or helpless victim) part of the appeal for us? Do we "identify with" the chaser or the chasee? Should we feel a little ashamed of ourselves afterwards? Or, as Captain Spaulding put it, are these just a bunch of jack-ass questions?

Great soundtrack, I may have to buy it....