Main cast: Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding), Bill Moseley (Otis Driftwood), Sheri Moon Zombie (Baby Firefly), Karen Black (Mother Firefly), Chris Hardwick (Jerry Goldsmith), Jennifer Jostyn (Mary Knowles), Erin Daniels (Denise Willis), Rainn Wilson (Bill Hudley), Tom Towles (George Wydell), Walt Goggins (Steve Naish), Robert Allen Mukes (Rufus Jr), Matthew McGrory (Tiny), Dennis Fimple (Grampa Hugo), Harrison Young (Don Willis), and William Bassett (Sheriff Huston)
Director: Rob Zombie
This tragic movie isn’t even a little entertaining. Rob Zombie packs his movie with B grade schlock and gore, but he is actually a tiny puny man masquerading as Clive Barker. The mild nudity in this movie just pretends to be exploitative, but it isn’t – it’s more like a sad wannabe attempt to emulate the truly bad horror camp classics it wants so badly to be. The gore is inept, the camerawork is worse, and the movie wastes so many opportunities to be really gory and watchable.
Four really colorless and unlikable teenagers stumble into a house filled with freaks, and that’s basically the story. There is some attempt to tie in these freaks with the local boogeyman, a mad surgeon that performs surgical experiments on people, but Zombie’s script is so inept in that I suspect that he probably wrote the script while he was in second grade. People die in remarkably boring ways, made worse by the inept camerawork. In this movie, chase scenes stumble and fumble, and the movie’s idea of “irony” by playing jovial songs over scenes of killing is just as inept. The amateurish camerawork detracts from an already dull movie.
In summary, not enough people die, they die in ways that are too boring to mention, and the final chase scene through some underground catacombs are so badly directed and captured that it’s like watching some grade school version of a Halloween play. Mr Zombie, thinking he’s some avant garde director, messes around with several cinematography and editing methods, but the result is akin to some rowdy ill-behaved kids let loose in a candy store.
The only reason to watch this movie is to do so with a bunch of friends so that everyone can have fun mocking and bitching about it. Even then, make sure everybody foot the rental bill together. You can’t pay too little for movies of limitless suckage like The House of 1000 Corpses.
