Harefooted Halloween: House of 1,000 Corpses

What I Liked: The production design is excellent.  Rob Zombie had a strong visual aesthetic in mind with the 70’s era costumes, the dilapidated farmhouse that’s packed to the brim with trinkets and fixtures and garbage, Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen with oddities like you’d find in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, even having half the movie take place during a roaring thunderstorm is deliberate.  And I have to mention the one room decorated floor to ceiling entirely in human bones and skulls looks amazing.  Everything has a layer of filth that Zombie did not want you to wash off easily.

The lighting is pretty exaggerated at times with neon pinks and greens popping up all over the place.  It doesn’t exactly blend but I still like it.

Sid Haig (Coffy, Jackie Brown) is fantastic as the demented clown Captain Spaulding.  He’s so rude and crude without being annoying which is difficult to pull off. (The man just died recently by the way, RIP Sid)

The movie delivers on the mayhem and nasty imagery of mutilated and disfigured bodies.  It’s not gory at all though and that works in the film’s favor.  By suggesting and showing the aftermath of the torturous killings the point clearly gets across.  And more importantly this technique makes the picture more palatable.  Apparently Zombie had alternate takes that showed more of the butchering but went with the toned down material to get an R rating.

What I Didn’t Like: The editing is quite bad.  There’s so much goddamn intercut footage of old black and white horror movies and of the Firefly family members (shot on video so it looks like shit) where they talk directly to the camera like a diary.  This stuff adds nothing to the film and gets very irritating very quickly.

The attempted robbery opening didn’t need to be included.  It’s the worst scene, the most amateurishly executed, it doesn’t do a good job of establishing the world we’ve entered and it’s so disconnected from everything else.  If you cut it nothing changes plot-wise.

Overall Impressions: This is definitely someone’s first movie.  Almost all the components are a mixed bag like the acting, the script and the camerawork (that’s why I didn’t want to put them into either category above).  But Zombie has undeniable passion for the project and it’s genuinely touching to see him pledge his love of all things horror.

Zombie’s biggest influence on this seems to be Texas Chainsaw Massacre so it’s hard not to draw comparisons.  Admittedly I had a difficult time getting past this on my first viewing but have embraced 1,000 Corpses for its own style over the years.  Zombie does have a unique voice in filmmaking and you can see the beginnings of that take shape here.  It’s very similar to Quentin Tarantino but I’ll get into that more in The Devil’s Rejects piece.

This one’s difficult to recommend.  The characters are loud, the humor is abrasive and the editing is obnoxious.  It feels like Zombie’s main focus was to maximize visual impact at the cost of everything else.  If you pause the movie at any point you’ll see that the frame is dense with so many objects and details to pick out and pore over.

Zombie also wanted a nightmare atmosphere and goes full on fantasy with it by the end.  We don’t know if we’ve left reality or are really trapped in an underground cave system filled with murderous crazies (sorta like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) and a dude performing revolting surgery.

1,000 Corpses shows a lot potential in a new filmmaker and like most debuts serves as a sort of sacrificial lamb to gain some experience and learn the process.  It’s an ok film that tends to get better each time I see it.