Freakadelic! (House Of 1000 Corpses (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	House Of 1000 Corpses (DVD)
Date:	10/07/03 (414 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wild, exciting and, very funny, this is how, horror films should be.

Disadvantages: It doesn't really, feature one thousand corpses, though. The title lies.

A regular complaint among horror film fans, myself included, is that they don't make 'em like they used to. Well, it turns out they do. Or at least that Rob Zombie does. Previously part of the metal band White Zombie, and responsible for the amazing hallucinogenic sequence in the Beavis and Butthead movie, this is, I believe, Mr Zombie's first full-length movie. And what a movie it is.

Set somewhere in the rural Deep South, the film's plot is pretty simple, and not really all that important. There's a gas station run by Captain Spaulding, a bald old guy with a wispy beard and clown make-up. The gas station is full of serial killer memorabilia, stuffed freaks, that kind of thing, and also features a ghost train ride full of serial killer exhibits, including tableaux of Albert Fish, Ed Gein and a local killer known as Dr Satan.

Four middle class kids from a nearby town arrive at the gas station to refuel, two guys and their girlfriends. The guys are hugely impressed by the tacky memorabilia and the ride, and Spaulding gives them directions to the tree where Dr Satan was lynched. Inevitably they get lost, and their car breaks down. They end up in a freaky house owned by a deeply, deeply weird Texas-Chainsaw style redneck family. When the kids try to leave they are violently prevented from doing so, and then the nasty fun really begins.

There are other elements, such as the fact that five cheerleaders have recently gone missing, and the anxious father of one of the girls goes looking for her, but these are really just diversions. The film focuses in on the horrifying fate of the four and their attempts to escape. The plot is largely incidental, the film being more a series of weirdo set-pieces than a story. It's a rollercoaster ride of a movie, or maybe a ghost train, with plot being unimportant - it could almost be seen as abandoning narrative altogether, rather like, say, Eraserhead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre do.


This is a very, very referential film. Horror fanboys like myself will have fun trying to spot all the references. The film takes place on Halloween, for one thing, and is set in 1977, the year of The Hills Have Eyes. The main plot, with hapless town dwellers falling foul of deranged redneck psychopaths is familiar from any number of places, although Texas Chainsaw and Hills Have Eyes are probably the most relevant. The normal strangers intruding on a weird, weird family, stranded overnight, is originally found in The Old Dark House, one of the greatest of the Universal horrors. (One of the first images in House of 1000 Corpses is Karloff opening the door in the Old Dark House, and the film is later heard playing on TV.) The magnificent Spiderbaby is another film with similar plot, and the family dynamic here owes a lot to that film. Then there's the awkward meal scene, a mainstay of, well, all the films I've mentioned above. And the film's atmosphere is redolent of Tod Brownings' Freaks, and the work of directors like James Whale in the 30s or Tobe Hooper in the 70s. It manages to cover a lot of ground, influence wise, and the mix it provides is brilliantly entertaining.

There are moments and images that explicitly pay homage to specific movies. Freaks is alluded to in a moment so fantastically grotesque that I wouldn't want to spoil it for you. The anxious parent waiting at home for his missing daughter is probably taken from Last House on the Left. The deformed face of Tiny, one of the family, resembles the make-up of Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum. The stuffed animal heads on the walls are from Psycho. There's a barn full of dead women that I swear was influenced by an extremely obscure slasher movie called Three on a Meathook. And a threat to make someone eat their own intestines must be a reference to Anthropophagous the Beast. The name of the film is reminiscent of 2000 Maniacs, yet another film in which evil
murderous rednecks butcher city folk.

(Sorry if I'm boring you all to tears with my stupid geeky horror film rubbish, here.) The cast, too, is filled with familiar faces. The excellent Sid Haig, who plays Spaulding, was the freaky bald kid in Spiderbaby. Billy Moseley, playing Otis, the leader of the deranged murderous rednecks, is in Texas Chainsaw 2 (he's the one with the metal plate in his head). (He bears a quite striking resemblance to Mark Heap, who was in Jam and Big Train.) Karen Black, the matriarch of the evil family, has been in more exploitation films than you can shake a stick at. One of the cops searching for the missing teenagers is Tom Towles, who played Otis in Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer. And so on.

The film doesn't go for suspense, nor is it particularly horrifying or unsettling. It's very successfully played for laughs. The performances from the family of weirdoes are so completely over the top that there's no way that you could ever take them seriously. Everyone clearly had a great deal of fun making the film, and it really shows on screen. Otis is an impressively demonic villain, but we're never expected to be scared of him, he's too entertaining. The other members of the family are similar. There's Baby, the weird, sexy girl who mimes to Marilyn Monroe and is seen rolling around naked with decomposing corpses. There's the mother, hideously flirting with everyone who crosses her path. Best of all there's Granpa, who shouts idiotic insults at an episode of The Munsters on TV and keeps flipping his middle finger at everyone.

I don't usually have much patience with horror films that are played for laughs, although most of the best horror films have a lot of humour in them. The nearest comparison I can find for this film is The League of Gentlemen, specifically the Papa Lazarou stuff. House of 1000 Corpses has the same vibe, but with more of an American carny feel to it,
its reference points obviously based on the other side of the Atlantic.

One crucial point is that you never have any sympathy for the four kids in the car, the victims. The girls are totally wet and uninteresting, and the guys are so annoying that you actually want bad things to happen to them. I for one was very happy when they did. They are extremely irritating geeks, and one of my friends came up with a theory that they represent directors like Tarantino or Kevin Smith, the kinds of idiots who take inspiration from classic old genre movies and then suck the life out of them. Here the classic genre movies are getting their revenge. It's a great theory. Probably bollocks, but a great theory. Whatever, this is the first American horror film I've seen for a while that didn't seem completely anaemic and pointless.

There are some extremely striking images and moments - the design is beautifully done. It's shot in a very rock-video kind of way, reminding me of the terrible Natural Born Killers in the way it's edited, with scenes from old black and white horror movies spliced in here and there, and sudden switches in film stock. Scenes such as a girl wearing a rabbit costume being chased through a makeshift graveyard and then brutally stabbed to death are excellent. There's a tremendous bit where a man is forced to kneel with a gun held to his head for what feels like hours before the trigger is finally pulled - perhaps the only bit of bona fide suspense in the entire film. So although the film is full of references and homages to earlier films it does have its moments of originality. It's quite fragmented, but is certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

Any disadvantages? A couple, I guess. The last ten minutes or so seems to belong to a different film, with a lone girl being pursued through subterranean tunnels by creatures that look like they belong in a computer game. And there are bits that I suspect people
will find quite offensive. Dead girls with the words 'Trick or Treat' carved on their naked breasts were, I thought, pushing it a bit. (I was surprised to learn that the film will be uncut when released in this country - the BBFC is generally very squeamish about dead women showing off their dirtypillows). And the framed picture of the Moors Murderers on Spaulding's wall will probably raise a few eyebrows over here - there's bad taste, and then there's shockingly bad taste, and this film lapses into the latter a few times.

I'm not sure I've really done this film justice. I loved it. I think it's divided opinion quite a bit, with people either loving or hating it (just like Blair Witch Project did). People complained about lack of suspense and horror, and lack of coherent plot. None of which are really valid criticisms if you ask me, because they're not things that the film is aiming for. I guess it will all depend on how receptive you are to this kind of thing. I loved it - the most visually inventive and entertaining American horror film I've seen for ages.

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