House of 1000 Corpses 2003

[2.2/10] Most haunted houses don’t have stories. That’s not really their goal. Sure, some ambitious ones try to construct a full narrative, but most of them settle on a theme or a premise and just let things spin out from there. You’re in a butcher shop that serves human, or a bunch of crazies have escaped from the local asylum, or you’ve been thrust into some sort of deranged circus. There’s less of a plot than there is a canvas upon which to create scares, united by a loose concept.

That works when the only purpose is to herd a bunch of anxious teenagers through a spook house for ten minutes. It fails miserably when you have to try to sustain that energy for nearly two hours. Because House of 1,000 corpses isn’t really a movie. It’s just a cinematic haunted house. There aren’t really characters or a plot or any sort of narrative progression. Instead, it’s just a bunch of aimless scares in search of an actual film.

That approach might work in a half-hour special or something more condensed. But stretched out to feature length it becomes utterly exhausting. Rob Zombie’s debut as a director is a pile of day-glo, blood-stained garbage, regurgitating the most hackneyed of horror tropes in a haphazard manner until the clock runs out. There’s nothing in House of 1,000 Corpses that even the moderately seasoned horror fan hasn’t seen before and seen better done elsewhere.

The worst part is that basically none of those scares is any good. There’s some juice in the final act, when a woman whose name I can’t even remember (despite finishing the movie less than an hour ago) trudges through some underground lair for the various victims and perpetrators she saw rhapsodized in a roadside attraction earlier. There’s at least some interesting production design, make-up, and prosthetics work there to create some scary images out of the famed “Dr. Satan” and bizarre fleshy Terminator-type who hunts hurt down.

But that’s really all this film has to offer. Everything else is a reheated and/or overblown version of other standard horror film blood and guts. There’s a creepy redneck murder family. There’s some faux-artistic vivisection. There’s creepy clowns and uncomfortable dinner scenes and random murders. It’s a grab bag of tropes stapled together by the flimsiest of premises. There’s no intentionality to any of it. It’s a cinematic exercise in “throw it against a wall and see what sticks.”

That extends to the godawful editing and direction. Tapped from the world of music, writer-director Rob Zombie shoots and chops up House of 1,000 Corpses like a music video. It’s full of thoughtless split diopter shots or odd filters or negative image color-grading thrown in at random that don’t advance any meanings or even scariness, but instead make the movie feel like the visual equivalent of a ten-year-old playing a casio keyboard and running through fifty different sound and rhythm settings in two minutes.

With that, the film is utterly spastic. It jumps from scene to scene, occasionally intercutting with some random nonsense, without any real rhythm or momentum. Even within a scene, the movie jumps from one moment to the next without enough connective tissue. Taken most charitable, you could argue that this is meant to give the film a disorienting quality, in the hopes of putting the audience in the victims’ shoes. But that doesn’t work when you use that approach for the whole movie, not just the moments where our would-be heroes are supposed to be caught off-guard.

But hey, that’s fine, because the characters are all terrible and barely-formed in this movie anyway. This is a film without a protagonist which, hey, can absolutely work in some circumstances. Here, on the other hand, it just adds to the lumpy formlessness of the whole endeavor. You can have great ensemble films, but that requires a variety of well-developed characters with distinctive personalities, and this film contains approximately none.

The quartet of young horror-researchers are forgettable idiots, especially the irksome and enthusiastic ring-leader who nearly makes it to the end. The two girls in the group are given basically no shading beyond “I want to get out of here.” And a pre-The Office Rainn Wilson possesses some charm but gets killed off too early in the movie to make much of an impact. All of the members of the redneck murder family and the police force are generic archetypes, with nothing to recommend them or make them memorable beyond the stale tropes each one invokes.

It doesn’t help that the acting in this film is godawful. The writing does the performers no favors, but everyone here, with a few minor exceptions, sounds either like they’re reading off the page or unconvincingly plays it for the cheap seats. The one exception is horror vet Sid Haig who plays the proprietor of a local roadside attraction with a creepy clown suit and the gift of gab. His lines and presence are cartoony, to be sure, but he chews the scenery in an entertaining and charismatic way when the rest of the cast can barely get in a good bite.

But the movie doesn’t know what to do with him. If you squint, you can see the outline of a story here -- a basic tale of road-tripping youths investigating local legends taken down by the town’s creepiest residents. Despite that, there’s not really a plot here, just a collection of scenes indiscriminately stitched together without any sense of building or turns or, you know, a point to it all.

The point, as best I understand it, is just to freak out the audience. In isolated pockets, the material Zombie puts up on the screen is disturbing enough to make your skin crawl. But genuinely frightening folks takes more than just random interludes of vaguely-scary crap. It calls for characters whose fates you give a damn about, actual tension in scenes so there’s a ramping up and catharsis when the kills happen, and, you know, actual talent at putting those scares together.

If Rob Zombie just wanted to do a haunted house, or even a music video, with this approach, it might be glancing and creepy enough to work in those mediums. But as a movie, House of 1,000 is a failed experiment that produced something no less mangled or unpleasant-to-watch than Dr. Satan’s victims.