La Maison des 1000 morts

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.

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.

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.

If you want real horror....a movie that will keep you up at night...this is it! The eerie lighting and music, the Firefly family, Captain Spaulding, the Fish Boy. Its all just so magical. Growing up in the 90's I was bombarded with cheesy, low budget horror. What a treat it was when Rob Zombie released this absolute gem. I dont want to ruin anything, so I'll just say that this movie is worth watching again and again. It changed the way I looked at the horror genre and I havent been the same since. Do yourself a favor and give it a watch. I still remember the first time I watched this movie. With a group of friends, on the couch, senior year 2005. We loved it so much we all went together a couple of years later to watch Devils Rejects in theaters. I'll admit, 3 from Hell was a bit of a let down, but Hof100C and Devils Rejects are absolute classics. Im honestly bummed its not rated higher. This movie deserves to be at least a 7. Have fun with this one guys, its unforgettable.

In my opinion, House of 1000 Corpses is a fan movie. Fans of both the horror genre and Rob Zombie are likely to love it. Though I do not count myself a fan of either, I do like both at times, and I am quite familiar with both. Those familiar with Rob Zombie are likely to be the only ones who completely 'get' this clever little film - appreciating its depraved sense of humor and nihilism. Zombie's themes are fairly consistent - evil (without the usual religious connotations and clichés), murder, sex, insanity, and stereotype "hillbillies". Zombie's world is not a place for people who are terribly concerned with reality, but, for Zombie himself, it seems to supply endless muse for a prolific and interesting commercial creativity.

Two couples traveling across country and working on a book on bizarre roadside attractions stumble across a filling station / theme park run by a vaguely evil clown with a bad attitude - Captain Spaulding. Spaulding teaches them of a few local legends, including a mad surgeon who worked in a local insane asylum and came to be known as Dr. Satan for the grotesque surgical procedures he applied to mental patients in secret. They pick up a pretty blonde hitch-hiker on their way to see the tree where Dr Satan was hung, and run into some car problems, so the hitch-hiker invites them to her family house. The family, apparently headed by the phenomenally weird Karen Black, makes The Addams family look like the Brady Bunch.

My narrative has described the first 20 minutes or so of the film, and at this point the film, much like RZ's songs, is so campy that it seems a straightforward horror comedy. However, once our protagonists are in "the house", the plot takes a decidedly more sinister spin, and never lets up from that point forward.

This film successfully and entertainingly portrays all of RZ's themes in about the same proportions as his music. Of them all, sex is the least explored, and I, for one, am thankful for that. The film also walks a delicate line between Hannibal Lector grotesque art realism and supernatural forces. For example, at one point, one of the bad guys turns on a cassette player with low batteries so that the voice recorded on it sounds extra-satanic.

If you have problems with blood and other bodily fluids, and utterly repulsive surgically induced variations on the human body, you might want to avoid this film. If you don't have any great objections to standard hardcore horror imagery, or if you like it, you might want to see this. It is masterfully visualized and does a much better job of making horror into art than the standard Hollywood horror fair. This is Rob Zombie's art, and he does it much better than most. This first major effort in film bodes well for his future use of the medium, and I will look forward to his next.