House of 1000 Corpses
Directed by Rob Zombie.
House of 1000 Corpses is a vile film that tries to be funny but never gets there AND has a sickeningly predictable ending. To be fair, the film begins promisingly, setting an intensely creepy mood. However this mood is sustained throughout the entire film by incredibly gory scenes of torture and violence with nothing to counterbalance the experience. Imagine being ready to jump in every scene, but desperately wishing that you were at home scrubbing the toilet or doing something more interesting instead of watching this film. The attempts at humour, partly through making references to almost every other horror film ever made (Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Rocky Horror Picture Show being the most obvious and most blandly referenced), just serves to make the film a more tedious experience.
So, what does happen in this film? The scene is set by introducing us to a backwater service station with a scary theme — A Museum of Monsters. The ‘monsters’ featured are those of the worst kind — human monsters, the serial killers. Unfortunately for four college students driving the backwater roads on Halloween eve, there are some of these real monsters living nearby. They stop at the servo for some ‘gas’ and check out the museum. The guys are keen to go on to one of the local landmarks mentioned in the museum — the tree where Doctor Satan, a sadistic torturer was hanged, and where his body went missing shortly afterwards.
On the way they pick up a sexy hitchhiker who lives in “them thair parts”. They get a flat and end up at the hitcher’s house, being entertained on the floor below the sadistic torture and rape of several cheerleaders. By the way, this film isn’t about the subtlety of suggestion; you pretty much get to see what the people in this house like to do to people they’ve coerced back to their house. What else is there to say? The students get slowly and graphically tortured: cut, skinned, stabbed, humiliated, surgically operated on, until the merciful end of the film where the ultimately predictable happens. If you want to see great “shock” horror, try something else, this is too vile to be a date movie, and too bland to be fun.
Esther Speight
