In preparation for Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell, I decided to have myself a little marathon and run through what's now unofficially become the Firefly Trilogy - comprising the three Rob Zombie movies featuring the eponymous Firefly family. With the entire series fresh in my mind, I figured I'd get all my thoughts out into the open in one big review.
First of all, a little history on Zombie himself - he's a rock star who, at the turn of the millennium, decided to become a filmmaker. Inspired by Marx Brothers classics and rough 1970s grindhouse flicks, Zombie was initially a new voice of creativity in a stale genre. This early success led him to direct his most high-profile pictures, the two Halloween remakes from 2007 and 2009.
The films had an extremely negative effect on his career as Zombie's indulgent, stylistic choices and scriptwriting were unfavourably compared to John Carpenter's restrained and practical storytelling(particularly in the infamously outlandish second film). Zombie would make one final attempt to win back respect with a tribute film to classic slowburn directors Argento and Kubrick in The Lords Of Salem. A noble effort that failed on account of the film being really dull.
See, the one thing you have to understand when you go into a Rob Zombie film is that Zombie is an entertainer, not a storyteller. Zombie's films may include certain themes and many interesting characters, but his first instinct has always been simply to keep the audience's eyes on the screen by metaphorically dangling keys in front of their faces.
Which isn't a bad thing, by the way. Sometimes that's all we want to unwind and there is nothing wrong with that. However, this does mean that Zombie only truly succeeds as a filmmaker when he
A) embraces that approach and B) actually throws in enough fun and original concepts to keep the audience's attention. That's a lot harder than it sounds.
Ironically, the closest Zombie actually got to being coherent was with his Halloween remakes, and those were lauded by both Carpenter and Zombie fans for not living up to either man's vision. So we're left with his original works, namely his one franchise - the Firefly Trilogy.
House Of 1000 Corpses is easily my favourite Zombie picture. It's bursting with the excitement of a new director wanting to make his mark, filled to the brim with colourful characters and dark humor and pays homage to many fantastic classics that came before.
The story isn't anything special - in fact, it borrows so heavily from Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre films that it's a miracle nobody sued Zombie. The psychotic redneck family, the dumb teenagers in a van, the sly gas station attendant are all accounted for. Heck, there's even a gigantic retarded family member wearing a leather mask! Given how absurd the Massacre sequels got, I don't think anyone would've batted an eye if this film was released as part of that series.
But fortunately, it also happens to be better than most of them. Corpses has the story of the original film, but is tonally very close to the feverishly crazed second and that's before we mention Bill Moseley, who actually stars in both this and Massacre Part 2!
Indeed, the cast are by far the biggest draw - Moseley plays a raving lunatic like nobody else, Sid Haig gloriously hams it up as the foul Captain Spaulding and Sheri Moon Zombie plays the best live action Harley Quinn we never saw. And even the lesser known family members are fun to watch in their own rights, as they interact with the other villains and of course the teenagers, who aren't memorable, but are thankfully likable.
What makes Corpses work so well for me is that Zombie doesn't seem to hold back on any aspect of it - everything is extravagant. The acting, the script, the set design, the direction... it goes in the most madcap directions and you're never quite sure what it's going to throw at you next. You just know it'll be weird and fun and very disturbing at the same time. If there's ever a perfect tone of horror film for Halloween viewing, then House Of 1000 Corpses nails it.
It feels almost like a reboot, like waking up from the bizarre dream that was Corpses into a stinky and unpleasant reality. The villains are no longer omnipotent torturers, but rather real people fighting for survival and their characters are reinvented to reflect that, with Moseley in particular being almost completely different, his "artistic" endeavours forgotten in favor of a self-glorifying Charles Manson-esque performance.
But for me, the high points of the film are the premise and the unforgettable finale. Rejects comes in and goes out of with a blast, but the middle section of the film isn't quite as impressive. It feels like there's a lot of sitting around and talking, whether it's in the motel or the brothel or the sheriff's station or elsewhere. And sure, a lot of torture and assault and banter gets done during that time, but one gets the impression that Zombie became so fond of the characters that he wanted the actors to bounce off of one another more than anything else. It's all very incidental, and I end up just waiting for the Fireflies to finish harassing their victims and move on to more interesting places.
Which leads me back to my word of the day, so to speak - entertainment. Rejects doesn't give me the impression that Zombie is trying to say something deeper about the Firefly family. He's simply experimenting and doing something very different, which I 100% support and clearly it paid off, but if we hold Corpses and Rejects up as equals, then Corpses simply is the film I like more. It's wilder, it's more memorable and it's a more pleasant viewing experience.
14 years after killing off his golden goose, Rob Zombie brings it back to life in 3 From Hell. It's not hard to see why. As I've already stated, the controversy of the Halloween remakes and the failure of The Lords Of Salem forced Zombie back into the sleazy corner of foulmouthed redneck horror. So in 2016(after crowdfunding because he's not big enough for a major release anymore), he released a film called 31, which featured circus troupe members duking it out with Nazi midgets and French aristocrat Malcolm McDowell.
And it sucked.
So at that point, where else could he have gone?
3 From Hell feels like exactly what it is, and it's especially painful as I saw it for the first time on the same night I watched Corpses and Rejects. It's like watching a fresh juicy apple sit next to a brown one, and then finally the moldy one. 3 From Hell is Zombie going on fumes, and not much more.
The premise is that the three Firefly survivors from the end of Rejects(Spaulding, Moseley's character Otis and Sheri Moon Zombie's Baby) all lived through the hail of gunfire that mowed them down at the end of that film.
As silly as that sounds, it's actually the least problematic thing about the movie, I think. Sure, it would've been cool to have Zombie return to the supernatural elements of Corpses and literally resurrect them, but even so, it fits to have the Devil quite literally reject them.
That is, until Sid Haig's Captain Spaulding is executed seven minutes into the film to accomodate the failing health of the actor. Unavoidable of course, and it's nice that Haig managed to reprise the part at all, but his replacement character bugs me. It's Richard Brake playing Otis's random half-brother "Winslow Foxy Coltrane" alias the Midnight Wolfman.
The reason why it bugs me is because Brake actually starred recently in 31, the previous Zombie picture, where he was the one and only fantastic element, a devoted monologue-prone assassin named Doom-Head. Why Zombie couldn't simply transplant that awesome character over to 3 From Hell confuses me to no end. As Coltrane, Brake is fairly forgettable, because the script never gives him the same commanding presence he had in that movie nor even a true backstory of any sort. He's there to give Otis and Baby a third member to talk to, and that's about all.
Moseley and Zombie, as the only two Firefly members, are fine. An attempt is made to showcase the passage of time by having Baby become even more deranged, but it's never really fleshed out and kind of fizzles out by the end. Moseley's the best thing in the movie by a long shot, he just looks like playing Otis is his vacation at this point. It's really funny seeing his performance progress over three films from a jaw-clenching cultist to a somewhat cranky old man who just happens to kill people. Tonally, the film goes for a similar dusty realistic feel as Rejects(ironic, given the much longer passage of time between this and that, versus the one year between Rejects and the wildly different Corpses)
Anyways, they go to Mexico and fight the cartel and that's about it. There is a reason that harkens back to Rejects, but it's not exactly the same as battling the rabid sheriff from that film. And then the movie just ends with them hilariously burning the last Mexican with a special effect that reminded me of Jesus Franco's 1970 Count Dracula films(flames superimposed over an actor writhing with burn make-up on).
So that's the Firefly trilogy, a truly weird, nonsensical series of horror flicks, each worser than the last. I've no idea what Rob Zombie will try next now that he seems to have exhausted all venues, but I'm still more excited than seeing the latest possession movie in the theaters, I can tell you that much.
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