Full Disclosure: I first saw this movie when I was thirteen years old, and I remember very clearly how upset I was by it. I remember feeling guilty and ashamed of myself for having sat through the whole thing, and I remember vowing to never see it again.
Ten years later, yesterday to be exact, I watched it again. And I’ve either been de-sensitized to the kind of images this movie represents, or I am just more acquainted with the kind of movie it is. Either way, House of 1,000 Corpses is one strange, funny, disturbing, and fun movie. You just have to get past its rough edges.
The first way to do that is to realize that the rough edges are part of the fun. If you watch Rob Zombie’s “Cribs” episode, you’ll see that he has something of a horror movie obsession. And he doesn’t care if it’s great or terrible. He buys and watches everything he can find. House of 1,000 Corpses feels like a mixtape produced by a man who can’t tell the different between good and bad taste. Or just doesn’t care.
The basic story follows Captain Spalding (played by a gleefully hammy Sid Haig) and his homicidal, inbred family as they systematically kidnap, torture and kill a group of twenty-somethings (including Rainn Wilson, pre-Dwight). At first, the movie plays like a pretty average slasher film, complete with young couples who just want to get home in the middle of a storm, but then it turns into something else. The kids are of little consequence, and we’re not really asked to like them or miss them when they’re gone.
A dissection begins, as it often does with Rob Zombie films, and the narrative falls apart into small vignettes showcasing focused explosions of violence, anger, and destruction. As this is Zombie’s first film after having directed several music videos, it isn’t all that surprising that the film has trouble sustaining a thought for longer than six minutes, but his ability to depict tone and mood through images isn’t a skill just any person has. His history as an obsessive film lover shows, whether you’re horrified, bored, or disgusted, you can’t help but see a real filmmaker in there.
And I could go on about trusting the villains more than the heroes, or the glorification of violence as commentary, or what it means to have a man named Zombie direct a counter-culture horror film thirty years too late, but it would all be something I’ve said before in this lovely Month of Horror.
No, what I really want to say is thank you. Over the last thirty days, you’ve read almost sixty horror movie reviews. Most of them were suggestions by various readers, and some of them were movies I’d not seen prior to this month. It’s been fun, and a little unpleasant, to devote so much time to scary movies, and I hope it was worth it.
For those of you who requested films that I didn’t cover, I’m sorry. There’s only so much I can do to feed the hungry. If you’re dead-set on a review, perhaps I’ll do it anyway if you let me know.
And tomorrow, for our final day of the Month of Horror, I have a special guest interview.
Happy Halloween.
