Here is my take on the subject of Rob Zombie's movies overall and the Halloweens in particular:
Review: 4 Stars out of 5. Fine debut, Rob. A super fresh shout-out to horror movie cliché. A gold star for snagging Karen Black; Sid Haig and Bill Moseley totally brought it.
'House of a Thousand Corpses' (2003)
This film ruled, I loved it. While I was beginning to feel needle pains Pinhead-style from Sherri Moon's lunatic laugh halfway through the film, it fit. Nice ass too. Really. Loved the chaps with no pants shot as she's heading into Red Hot Pussy Liquors and I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. Zombie's not stupid. Even Morrissey could see that and at least remember the stirrings of a boner because that's the hot shit right there. This film is a real visual treat all around.
Review: 4 Stars out of 5. Fine debut, Rob. A super fresh shout-out to horror movie cliché. A gold star for snagging Karen Black; Sid Haig and Bill Moseley totally brought it.
'The Devil's Rejects' (2005)
The sequel to HOATC, the cornpone Fireflys are now at large and on a murderous spree while attempting to evade the law. Zombie's obsession with capitalizing on his wife's White Trash Skank appeal continues. Meh. I'm totally over Sheri Moon now. So was Karen Black I guess because she wasn't in this one. Actually, I'm sure she's just didn't want to go where Zombie was with this film. 1,000 Corpses was camp and probably appealed to Karen Black for this reason because she herself is a camp icon of horror. Rejects is definitely not a campy film, or anything else remotely redeeming; it was a total wankfest.
Review: 2 Stars out of 5. Rob, you're starting to get too serious and it's not working. Your characters know this (whether the actors do or not isn't the point) and they're really struggling here. Nods and bonus points all around for conveying the physical stink of these people on film. It was practically a scratch and sniff.
'Halloween' (2007)
No longer in the role of 'Baby' from Corpses or Rejects, it's obvious that Sherri Moon can't act. It's painfully obvious while she's delivering expletive-laden lines that this is a woman who is totally uncomfortable with swearing, thereby reinforcing that she can't act. "It seems like you're calling me every fuckin' day to come down to this fuckin' school," from her sounds like me reading out loud from a Thai menu.
Zombie thought that just in case you didn't get enough of his wife's ass in the previous two extravaganzas, and because she has no boobage to speak of, there's more of it in this movie. The highlight of her performance here is on the pole and obviously being born to wear one of those rabbit fur collage jackets. I realize too in this film that lip injections may be called for because her mouth looks like a mailslot.
In this version of Halloween, we're shown a young Michael Meyers as coming from a tumultuous home where he's shoved aside and either verbally abused or derided by everyone except his mother (oh, here we go...). His mom is a stripper who has no time for him because she's always working. He's bullied at school. Michael the lad starts off killing animals before working his way up to bully retribution and murder of his household excluding his infant sister(*) and his mother (she wasn't home). Incidentally, the FBI cites animal cruelty as an early hallmark of serial killers, nevermind your garden-variety sociopaths. Actually though, poor Michael displays symptoms of a dissociative disorder too and...damn you Rob Zombie, you've taken this movie right off the rails! More on this is a second.
Review: 3 Stars out of 5. Good casting with the kid, he looks like the poster child for behavioural disorders: "Is He Lighting Fires?" Malcolm McDowell must owe back taxes. Brad Dourif rocks in everything.
'H2: Halloween 2' (2009)
Ever seen the video for 'Stay' by Shakespeare's Sister? Zombie obviously has. Mrs. Moon-Zombie is cast in another white nightie, this time as some kind of evil fairy (WHATever) who is the influence behind Michael Meyers' homicidal lunacy. This totally gives a big cornuto to the bigger-than-life butchers of the horror sub-genre. They have all been pussified by the blatant reveal of a troubled childhood, along with conduct and thought disorders, in Halloween (2007) and now even moreso with this latest installment by just being plain old run-of-the-mill whipped by an evil, no doubt emasculating female (Zzzzzzzz....by the way).
What makes The Slasher special is that there is no reason for what he does. There isn't supposed to be. He just IS. That's why he's badass. He is the ultimate symbolism of a walking, raging hard-on raping and pillaging everything in its path. Nobody wants to hear about him being a bed-wetter.
Come on Rob, you saw what they did to Leatherface in the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His real face is shown to us, we find out "they all picked on my boy," and he became a total second-banana to R. Lee Emery's sheriff. He was totally stripped of his Slasher powers and any demented allure he once held for us. His secret is out and he's figuratively castrated as a result. Why compound the error? What happened, did a fledgling career in social work go awry?
You're pulling fans down a road we couldn't care less about. We don't want to understand. We want to sit in deliciously gripping anticipation and wait for The Slasher to get it on, not take meds and primal scream in a corner. Nobody cares about the boy inside the man here. The Slasher-flick is like porn: the plot is incidental and not central to the action, which is carnage/fucking. Nobody cares for the 'whys' of the carnage/fucking; as long as there's carnage/fucking - and lots of it. You don't hear about marriage counselling (or love) in porn do you? Same thing applies with the Slasher-flick.
You obviously didn't heed my warning earlier: you're getting way too serious. If you want to address 'issues,' come up with a vehicle that's totally your own, don't piggyback on a glorious member of the horror film family. You're trying to bring reality and reason where it doesn't belong. The Slasher-flick is supposed to give its audience the thrill and adrenaline rush of the terror without the sobering reality of Ted Bundy or the Manson family.
If we want that realism shit we can just read the life story of every homicidal maniac who's been taken into custody since the medical community and law enforcement authorities began documenting 'contributing factors' and arguing 'nature or nurture.' It's not thrilling anymore. The 'bloom is off the rose' when they're behind bars. They're disordered personalities, and or abused, and or hate their mother, and so on...bo-RING. The only ones who are remotely interesting are the ones who do it 'just because.' They pique something in us with our normal minds because we can't fathom them. We don't think like that, so there's mystery there.
Take the Zodiac Killer for instance. Why is he still so fascinating? He is fascinating precisely because he's never been caught and nobody knows who the the hell he was or is. He came out of nowhere and then disappeared right back into nowhere. He was, and remains, unkown and totally killed at random. Is someone just like him out there right now? We know the answer to this: of course there is, and that is The Slasher. He's real enough and so we don't want to humanize him in the world of fantasy because there we secretly want to be afraid.
Fear, which is an extremely primitive emotion, leading up to the chemical 'fight or flight' response in the brain doesn't get used very much anymore since Homo Sapiens arrived at the top of the food chain. We ceased to be everyday prey for other animals a very long time ago, so we go to be "safely afraid" in a darkened cinema to provoke an emotion that is older than our species, universal to nearly all (vertebrates anyway), and that emotion is fear.
When we start to understand these killers as people, we can then put their crimes into some kind of rational context. We have to because by understanding their childhoods, their failings as people and what motivates them, we take away their power to terrorize us: very necessary and empowering in real life but majorly sucking in horror movies.
Review: I'll have to wait until this summer to view and rate this movie but Malcolm McDowell apparently still owes taxes. Brad Dourif Rocks in everything.
(*) Some serial killers 'work their way in' in terms of victimization. Herb Baumeister and Edmund Kemper operated this way: they began or preoccupied themselves with stranger killings but were actually progressing toward family members who, in their minds, were the real 'problem.'
Baumeister began dumping bodies on his own property and incrementally closer to the home he shared with his wife and children. The authorities impressed upon Mrs. Baumeister she was very lucky they were on to her husband when they were. Herb Baumeister fled, committed suicide and was never brought to justice.
Ed Kemper's last victim was his mother. He removed her larynx and put it down the garbage disposal and proclaims he is alright now for having done so.
I despised "House of 1000 Corpses." I couldn't believe all the positive reviews I read, hailing Rob as the next big thing, blah, blah, blah. The gore was a joke, and frankly, the segment with the underground doctor didn't make any damn sense. Needless to say, I didn't bother with "The Devil's Rejects" nor his "re-imaging of'Halloween'" debacle. And screw Sherri. She's cute, but bitch is a marginal actor, at best.
ReplyDeleteOops, forgot to mention Baumeister. I didn't realize that the cops suspected he might have started targeting his family, next. I know at one point, his kids found human bones in the woods near their home, and Herb managed to convince his wife that it was just an old med school skeleton he'd found in the basement. My facts might be off a bit, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Goes to show how people will believe anything to justify the bizarre behavior of their loved ones. I mean, a human skeleton isn't just something you'd waltz by en route to the washing machine without noticing, you know? But instead of wondering why she had never seen a skeleton lying around the house in however-many-years of marriage, his wife just accepted it without question. Scary, scary, scary.
ReplyDeleteCodzilla, yep, that's the gist of it. Her eyes were willfully closed to other things to, like a sexless marriage (aside from the two kids of course) for one because her husband was Gay. She wanted the perfect marriage, house, businesses & kids and so well she was willing to overlook it I guess. I'm not saying she was any kind of accessory-after-the-fact because she wasn't but she saw only what she wanted. I don't know if it even twigged with her he was Gay, she did say they didn't have "romantic" love, it was "a family" love. Uh huh. It didn't seem to bother or faze her. Maybe it was a Lavender marriage, we'll never know.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I wonder how many lives could have been saved if she had opened her damn eyes? The nonexistent romantic life, human remains in the fucking front yard (!!!), etc. As you said, she wasn't an accomplice in the traditional sense, but if she had just reported her observations to anyone at all, maybe some of those poor men would still be alive, and their families wouldn't be torn to pieces.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if any of that weighs on her.
Giving her the benefit of the doubt, it was a large, wooded property so the bodies weren't literally piling up outside the door but still...if she did suspect something and said nothing, that's worse in my mind.
ReplyDeleteI can't recall her demeanor in terms of any sense of remorse in the interview I saw but I do recall she was guarded and measured what she said (so she's not stupid, or she had all her questions in advance and her lawyer advised her) but I did get the impression that what freaked her out the most was that she and her kids could have been victims.
It's exactly because of the closet that this kind of shit can happen. Same thing with prostitute murder. People on the margins of 'traditional' society aren't considered as valuable by that society. Jesus, we only have to see Pickton and Ridgway and their respective body counts to see that: obviously nobody cares when Gays (oh, 'high-risk' lifestyle), prostitutes ('high-risk' lifestyle and 'transient') or any other person who leads a different lifestyle disappears.
And that's precisely what these killers count on.