The Lords of Salem

I shall start this review by saying that I like Rob Zombie both as a musician and as a filmmaker.  I have his albums, I have seen him in concert, and I enjoyed House of a Thousand Corpses and Devil's Rejects.  I even liked his remake of Halloween although many did not.

So what happened with his latest film The Lords of Salem?  My son and I decided to watch it on Friday the 13th. I had missed it in theaters, it was there and gone before I had a chance. 

The Lords of Salem

The film opens with some witches dancing about the bonfire in the middle of the night, presumably in old Salem, MA circa the 1600s.   We then cut to young Heidi, a radio DJ for an independant Salem radio station.  Heidi Hawthorne is played by Rob Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon Zombie.  She seems like a hipster in the movie with a loft style apartment in an old house. She wears vintage clothing, her hair is in dreadlocks, she sports hipster glasses and her apartment is decorated with oversized paintings like Melie's iconic rocket in the eye of the moon.  Her landlady, Lacy Doyle (Judy Geeson) seems like a pleasant woman, who lives in the same apartment building. Of course people aren't always who they seem. Then there is the mystery of Apartment 5 down the hall from Heidi. Her dog constantly barks at the door, and sometimes Heidi hears the door open and close, but the apartment is supposedly vacant.

Things change for Heidi when she gets a package of an old LP record to be played on air at her radio station.  The music sounds like theme music for a video game like Silent Hill, or a creepy instrumental track by Sheri Moon's heavy metal husband, Rob Zombie.  In any event, it triggers odd dreams with Heidi of the witches that opened the film.  Several radio listeners go into a trance like state when the song is played on the radio.

An author of witchcraft books that just appeared on Heidi's radio show, Francis Mathias (Bruce Davison) is fascinated by the music, and traces it back to a journal of Francis Hawthorne, infamous for the Salem witch trials.   Heidi begins to act strange.  Her boyfriend and fellow DJ Herman Salvador (Jeff Daniel Philips) and her other co DJ  Herman Jackson (Ken Foree) are concerned that she may be using again. 

In the meantime, Lacy  and two of her very strange friends, Megan (Patricia Quinn - Rocky Horror Picture Show) and Sonny (Dee Wallace - The Hills have Eyes) invite Heidi in for tea. A detailed palm reading leaves Heidi very upset.

 Are the Lords of Salem coming back to retake Salem, MA? 

Visuals

Like his music videos and stage shows, Rob Zombie is a master of creepy visualization. Even the Woolite commercial he directed has a cinematic style that is unique.  Zombie's visuals in The Lords of Salem are top notch. The film does indeed look creepy especially in its dream like sequences. 

Problems

The biggest problem with the Lords of Salem for my son and I was simply that it was not scary.  We watched it on my home theater system, so we got the maximum impact of the film, but it just didn't strike a chord.  As the film progressed, we meet the three modern day witch decendants of the original witches of Salem.  When they proclaim that they are coming to worship Satan, the effect was comical, not frightening.   My son actually started to play carnival music on his piano and laughed out loud.

The acting is also not very good. I understand that Rob Zombie likes to cast his wife in all his movies, but truth be told, she is not the best actress. She goes through the role of Heidi displaying very little emotion and mostly seems zoned out.

Summary

The film was fun to watch, the visuals were quite good, but Lords of Salem never really grabbed me the way a good horror film would. I never experienced the goosebumps or the jump in my seat of great horror.  I am sure Zombie was going for an avant garde homage to classic 70's horror, but instead I felt the whole thing was a bit cheesy. It certainly was not scary.  When I saw the trailers I thought the film would be scary, and I found my self on the edge of my seat watching Zombies earlier horror films.  Here, I just didn't quite get it, and I only gave Lords of Salem 2 stars.

Recommend this product? No