HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES is a Lions Gate Films presentation, rated $ for strong sadistic violence/gore, sexuality and language. The run time is 88 minutes and the American release date was April 11, 2003.

You know, a lot of really great horror films didn’t feel the need to be self-referential and played for humor like SCREAM. That’s the reason why this year, we had two films that took their cue from the classics.

The first one I had already written a review for was called WRONG TURN. A summer title that surprisingly did plenty bank (more than FROM JUSTIN AND KELLY, WILLARD and GIGLI combined, and was able to turn a profit given its budget of $10 million), this movie had all the bite and visceral relentlessness of the cheesy 1980s slasher films set in the forest, bringing memories of THE FINAL TERROR, JUST BEFORE DAWN, THE PREY and maybe even THE HILLS HAVE EYES as well. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it sure was damn good popcorn-chomping excellency, “great trash” as opposed to loathsome dreck. The second one is about to hit DVD and video, and it’s the long-awaited Rob Zombie gorefest HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, which grossed a little less than WRONG TURN in theaters, but still did considerably well enough that a supposed sequel is in the works.

Heavy metal’s most theatrical junket of B-movie carnage and monstrous splendor, Rob Zombie has decided to give a movie that draws more from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE than to HALLOWEEN, as a current wave of teenaged slasher films have proved to ascend from. However, there was something about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE which was so good, that it produced genuine claustrophobic sadism without ever really going over-the-top. Sure the family had their moments of laughable bickering (the cook who says “I told you never to go near that graveyard!” and “You damn fool! You ruined the door!”), but the sadistic impulses of the characters were played with unflinching intensity and realism.

Take THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and camp it up like a brain-dead satire, then throw in relentless amounts of gore and a director whose pedigree stems from directing music videos heavy on montages and references of older material and also of obscure horror imagery, and then you might just understand where HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES comes from.

The plot is as similar as waking up in the morning. Four young adults are driving through a rainy Halloween night in an unspecified town, and they begin to run out of gas. However, Zombie doesn’t decide to let the lack of fuel be the downfall for our guests: he lands them near Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen, which combines a miniscule theme park with a convenience store and gas station and fried chicken fast-food restaurant. The boorish and psychotically feisty Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) takes the curious youths through the attraction called the Murder Ride, which mentions the legacy of one Quentin “Dr. Satan” Quayle, a nefarious surgeon who works to create the living dead. One of the kids, Jerry (Chris Hardwick, a former host of MTV shows “Trashed” and “Singled Out”), is so carried away he demands the clown-faced museum honcho write him a map to the Deadwood area where Satan has been said to have practiced. We see a character shoot out one of the tires on the kids’ ride and they are forced to be led to shelter at some strange house.

Already elements of TCM and ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW come into play, but I’m not finished yet and neither is the White Zombie!

The house is occupied by colorfully demented Southern monsters, including the trashy Hollywood-culture fanatic Baby (Zombie’s baby Sheri Moon), the Manson-type looney Otis (Bill Moseley of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE…PART 2), and the femme fatale Mother Firefly (the great Karen Black). It doesn’t take long before the kids blow the invitation and irritate the hosts, who ruin their chance of escape and hold them as prisoners inside their corpse-laden house of horrors.

The unfortunate roadsters, as well as some missing cheerleaders, are all systematically sliced and made into freaky dead specimens, except for the surviving female victim, Denise (Erin Daniels). She manages to escape being buried alive in a pit with zombies and has a chance encounter with the legend himself…Dr. Satan.

There is a way to have made this movie that would’ve actually proved to have worked as a claustrophobic shock film, the kind of movie that’s raw meat and flesh above the “mainstream sh*t” Zombie defaces. Unfortunately, Zombie is one of this film’s big problems.

The director loves to show lots and lots of montages that look straight out of a rock video, complete with zippy edits, outrageous filters and processed blurry picture, and also clips lifted from old black-and-white horror films and cheap porno. In the 21st century, he fails to restrain himself, and for some reason, this looks more like a vanity project than an exploitation re-imagination. There are moments when he plays the material for straight chills and gruesome kicks though, and they work well given Zombie’s pedigree, but not every scene needs to have bookends of some sort.

The other big problem with this movie is that these killers are WAY too colorful to register as threats, and to say they are more full of presence than the heroes is to state the insanely obvious. For a moment, it felt like I was watching leftovers from some kitschy Wes Craven film from the late 80s-early 90s, like SHOCKER or PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. The cast of genre starts inhabit their roles with menace and sleaze, but the script saddles them with one-liners and cartoon-like intimidation that belies the idea that these are supposed to be really bad mothers. The animated menus make these villains look more like comedians pining to have a handicapped match with Freddy Krueger, but I will get to them later.

This movie ladles on the outrageousness, with jars that contain dead fetuses, racy and heavily-profane dialogue from the villainous leads, over-the-top deliveries (Sheri Moon’s laugh is the pinnacle), and plenty of wild gore, be it from bullet wounds or sliced/peeled-off skin, messy corpses and also a gruesome stabbing in the dark. Don’t say this movie isn’t as graphic as it should have been.

For all of this film’s brain-dead overindulgence (I didn‘t mention some Groucho Marx influence and also lines in the opening scene inspired by a White Zombie song of “Grease Paint and Monkey Brains”), I can’t stay mad at this film. There are really some genuinely frightening moments that will play well in the dark of a living room, especially in the final sequence of the film, where Zombie actually gets serious and decides to repulse and disturb. Bizarre enough, Zombie and cinematographer Tom Fraser, working with a $7 million dollar budget, seem to have perhaps spent all their money on the set pieces, which is like something out of a Baz Luhrmann remake of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. In a way, the film is better looking and more glitzy than MOTEL HELL was.

I also applaud Erin Daniels, who plays Denise, for going all out with her heroine running away bit and actually getting herself beat up and battered and looking adequately dirty like in a great independent thriller. She actually kind of grew onto me, more than her lousy friends did.

Chris Hardwick acts like David Arquette most of the time, and that’s fine only when I’m watching David Arquette. His doofus shtick equals a great potential of death, as does the amazingly annoying and shrill factors of the other two characters, who thankfully get their demises first. Bill (Rainn Wilson) is a bland sci-fi geek who is so easily a push-over that I couldn’t even find the potential for a Straw Dog anywhere inside of him, and his girlfriend Mary (Jennifer Jostyn) makes dumb moves and says dumb things like she is so insistent on sticking to screenplay conventions she has to screw her pals over. It’s basically the one instance which irritates the family that falls on her action, and it was a pretty stupid mistake.

Aside from the creepy and highly playful work by Bill Moseley, Karen Black, Sid Haig, Sheri Moon, Matthew McGrory (as the deaf-mute burn victim Tiny) and also Jake McKinnon as the hulking, bile-spitting Professor, the supporting cast flounders. Veterans like Michael J. Pollard and Tom Towles have bit parts which go nowhere, and everyone else is simply throwaway.

Seeing as how its director is a musician, the movie provides Rob Zombie with a chance to collaborate with Scott Humphrey on the dark original music, and for Rob to cram some work from The Ramones (“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”), Helen Kane (“I Wanna Be Loved By You”), Slim Whitman (“I Remember You”), and the ever-popular Commodores (“Brick House”) into the mix.

Why should I bring up this film’s infamous lack of distributional clout from Universal (where most of the sets used in this film stem from) and also its brief stint from MGM? This is a movie that took three years to finally have been released, and all of a sudden my enthusiasm is somewhat unrewarded by viewing this film. Rob Zombie is a horror movie fan of course, as he even opens this film with the kind of cheesy horror movie on TV format by using “Dr. Wolfenstein’s Creature Feature” and then cutting to a Captain Spaulding commercial. The problem is that Zombie has not the skill to direct to direct yet, and all the freak-show and Grand Guignol gruesomeness he can chuck on the screen is no match for sheer, unadulterated creepiness.

Concluding my movie review, I also noticed HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES hardly lives up to its title. There wasn’t really 1000 corpses in this film, and I’d say maybe at least a quarter of them do appear. This leads me to think of two things, either they’re saving the corpses for the planned sequel, or at least a good 100 or less were actually behind the camera on the set of this film.

However, Lion’s Gate Entertainment have paid attention to the zombies out there in America, releasing a special edition release of this baby. If you can get over the fact that this isn’t like the rather bare-bones release of MAY, like I did, maybe you’ll discover the neat things this one has to offer. The film itself is presented in typical widescreen format, aspect ration 1.85:1, with English or Spanish subtitles and audio tracks in Dolby Digital 5.1, 2.0 and also a 2.0 track with an isolated score.

Hardly any grain was spotted on this transfer, and edge enhancement or artifacts failed to intrude on my party. All of those annoying flashback sequences wear the wear on their sleeves, and the Super 8/Digital Video shots look especially and intentionally ugly. Other than that, there was hardly a thing wrong with the picture! The bloody reds and the shadowy darkness shine through with solid precision, and shadow lineation, little there was, seemed entirely accurate. A wonderfully solid presentation throughout.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track takes such a cheap film and makes it sound like a rich blockbuster, something which can hardly be done with a lot of the older chestnuts. The rear speakers make excellent use of the stormy ambience and the pile-driving music, and stereo separation and frequency across the front was splendid. Directional effects packed a wallop, and the music sounded raw and ferocious. All of the dialogue was never obscured or down-pitched, and recorded with clarity and natural splendor. Even the bass and .1 LFE awakened up some life.

Now to get to those animated motion menus. Rob Zombie went back with Sheri Moon, Bill Moseley and Sid Haig to create some material for the DVD menus, and when you ring the bell at the main menu, along comes Captain Spaulding inviting you to check out the disc. However, if you decided to take your precious time looking over the options, he gets pretty sore and starts to roast your a**, even if he is ogling a porno mag and gorging on chicken. When you do pick an option, Sid’s on the other side with a small introduction to the forthcoming menu. Pick “scene selection,” and Otis rants up a storm about Tiny and the various scenes in his own menu. Go to “special features,” and Baby gives you a rundown of what to expect on the extras, and also blows her top (not literally) given you’re undecisive. All three characters unite in the “set-up” menu.

These menus make the characters seem funnier than they are in the movie, but I still thought this was a really classic idea. If you go to the “scene selections” and “special features” menus, make sure to play with your remote’s arrow controls because you just might find some eggs.

Enough of that, let’s get to the extras! Rob Zombie provides audio commentary where he explains the stock footage’s origination, talks about the problems with shooting (especially on the Universal Studios lot, with all the tourist attractions still active), mocks most of his character’s personalities (irritating females and a geeky male victim), and also delves into many little anecdotes and personal opinions about certain scenes. Zombie is entirely calm and at ease on this one, with no hostility toward the distribution controversies projected throughout. If you like the film or just plain are a swinging hellbilly, I’d say you check this out!

There are two on-set featurettes, but they are far too short to merit any real insight. Making Of Featurette is really random interviews and opinions from the cast (EPK with grunge) meant to fill out a 4 minute length, and is over before you know it. Behind-the-scenes is really 2:34 of brief on-set camera footage from the well shoot, and mostly concerns a rope with attitude.

Casting is really just 2:05 of rehearsal footage concerning Dennis Fimple reading for Grampa, and probably could’ve been squeezed in with the other rehearsals, the best of them is where Bill Moseley and Jennifer Jostyn practice a torture scene in a 3:27 clip. The other two feature Chris Hardwick, Rainn Wilson and Erin Daniels, and run below a minute in length each. There’s also a curious little bonus called Tiny F*cked A Stump, recorded for this DVD, as Baby, Otis and Spaulding tell ribald “knock knock” jokes concerning how Tiny…well, read the title.

A quartet of only mildly interesting interviews follow, which contain subtitle questions followed by spoken answers. Moseley, Moon, Haig and FX artist Wayne Toth are each given clips, where they are asked about the film’s success, the action figures, the characters, the evolutions and experiences, and the inevitable…“What’s your favorite scary movie?” Moon hardly has a lot to comment on, and as a result, her clip is only 1:32. The rest of them speak well at length with times that span from 3:33 (Toth) to 4:28 (Moseley) and 5:42 (Haig).

Capping off the set is a comprehensive photo gallery with over 100 slides of publicity photos/behind-the-scenes shots and helpful captions providing info on what the picture is of, two theatrical trailers (one a teaser, the other a full-length ad), one radio spot, and also additional previews for CABIN FEVER, MAY and GODSEND. A three-star recommendation for this DVD alone, simply because the DVD menus are sweeter than a lot of the ones I‘ve seen recently.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age