Kelly WandA film by Rob Zombie
September 23rd 2006 03:14
The notion of Rock Star turned actor is seldom one that ends in rejoicing. Madonna is frequently pointed out as an example of this. She is, however, very good in “Desperately Seeking Susan” and Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game”. The latter film isn’t the world’s easiest watch so a good performance there just added to the audience’s pain. I also take a perverse delight in her performance in “Who’s That Girl” based entirely on the fact that I used to hang out with a woman who was exactly that character. I am a sentimental fool.
Before you think I’m rushing to defend Madonna, may I just make this list; “Evita”, “Swept Away”, “Shanghai Surprise” and “Body of Evidence.” Crimes against cinema, one all. Certainly reason for banishment from the silver screen at best. Some have used these films as a cornerstone for their case for the restoration of the death penalty. Whilst I am no fan of Capital Punishment, their arguments have at least demanded I consider my position.
Mick Jagger may have given us a credible “Performance” but even he pretends that “Ned Kelly” never happened. He kept quiet until “Freejack” over a decade later. He needn’t have bothered; certainly, audiences were not.
Elvis Presley may have been the King of Rock and Roll but he may as well have thrown his crown in the bin when he answered Hollywood’s call. If he had only limited himself to “Flaming Star”, “Kid Creole” and “Jailhouse Rock”, we may have forgiven him. He didn’t and I, for one, cannot be charitable.
David Bowie has had a fair old run in the cinema. Let’s call him the exception to the rule whilst calling up a roll call of horror. From Cliff Richard, through Bob Dylan, David Essex, Gene Simmons, John Lydon, Mariah Carey and on to Britney Spears; it is a catalogue of atrocity.
David Johanson and Henry Rollins have managed to pick up a few odd bucks here and there through some nice cameo roles. Then again, the few of us who stand at the shrine of the New York Dolls and Black Flag are a far from massive posse.
Yes, my friends, acting is not an assured passage for the failing star. Even fewer have successfully followed a career into direction. David Byrne’s “True Stories” has its admirers but one can also find people who will pay good money to have unfeasibly large objects inserted into their recta.
Even the most hardened of masochists are unlikely to draw any pleasure from Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clare”. Despite the obsessive clamour of fans for the release of the man’s 292(!) minute opus, even Dylan is unwilling to test the patience of the marketplace and Dylan usually pays the marketplace no heed at all. That should be a warning.
That brings us to the strange and worrying case of one Rob Zombie. Rob used to sing with White Zombie and I would recommend their “More Human than Human” as the perfect music to bang your head to. Even an old fart like me cannot resist a bit of head spinning, hair flinging action when faced with the works of Messrs Zombie and Co. Rob also runs a side line in film direction and I have not come to bury the fucker; I have come to praise him.
Let me tell you about my experience of his debut feature “House of a Thousand Corpses”. When it was released on DVD, I picked it up off the shelf and gave it a curious glance. A complete stranger came running over to me and told me not to buy it. He said it was the worst film he had ever seen bar none. He was so moved by the sheer awfulness of this production to make it his life’s work to save others from its vileness and ineptitude.
I was impressed. How is that for advertising. If I’d have had the thirty seven bucks that JB Hi Fi were demanding, I would have picked it up there and then. A couple of days later, I was over at the Video Ezy and the chick behind the counter refused to rent the thing out to me. She couldn’t in all good conscience take money off a customer for trash such as this.
What the hell was going on? Well here is my twenty cents worth; “House of a Thousand Corpses” was the first decent horror film of this millennium. It has been a long time since a director arrived who could produce something of the calibre of Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, John Carpenter’s “Halloween”, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” or Cronenberg’s “Rabid”.
Yeah. It is that good. It is, however, recklessly amoral. Centring in on a peculiar quirk of Slasher flicks (the dispatch of repulsive victims who we wont really miss), we find ourselves quietly rooting for the psycho, hillbilly white-trash killers. They have the best jokes and all the best lines.
The police shoot out sequence delivered to the music of Slim Whitman’s “I Remember You” is an extraordinary piece of cinema worth the price of admission alone. It takes a pinch of Peckinpah and adds a massive dollop of David Lynch with the corouge to crane away from the violence. It will be copied for years to come.
The film echoes to hints of Tarantino, Argento and Bava. There’s a little bit of “Blood on Satan’s Claw” as well as a dash of Joe Dante and “Natural Born Killers”. All these influences are combined as a stunning whole; something much more than the sum of its parts.
Of course, you could write this off as a fluke. You could say that Zombie merely cobbled together the best bits from his favourite films and that I’m an idiot making shapes out of passing clouds. Okay. If that’s the case, explain “The Devil’s Rejects” to me.
When David Stratten got up on the Movie Show and gave the film an unprecedented zero stars, I was queuing up at the cinema. His was a review that went so far beyond prejudice that Zombie must have been doing something really right. You might call “The Devil’s Rejects” a sequel to “House of a Thousand Corpses” because, story wise, it follows its predecessor. In terms of tone, men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.
Are fun loving psychos are no longer fun. It is like finding the novel of your latest Hollywood blockbuster and discovering the author told a completely different story. The Firefly Family are scum and the police investigation includes a de-construction of the origins of the family name from Marx Brothers films.
Despite this redrawing of his characters, Zombie works even harder to make them his heroes. He achieves this by drawing the avenging police who pursue them as something far more monstrous than they are. The strangers they waylay along the road are far sleazier than they could ever be. It is a trick that not many directors would even try these days but the notion of the anti-hero is at the core of the film.
Instead of drawing cinematic influences from horror films, this time Zombie draws on a tradition of nineteen seventies anti-authority road movies. There’s a bit of everything from “Badlands”, “Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia” and “Sugarland Express” through to “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Thelma and Louise” and “Two-Lane Blacktop”. The ending is inevitable. The rain of bullets would be far less effective if they were righteously fired. This is a film that asks us to consider consequence.
Its Seventies soundtrack of southern style rock is a wonderful rediscovery and a perfect way of capturing the mood of the time. The Freebird sequence is another amazing piece of cinema. All in all, this is a great film. Of course, you don’t have to believe me. I could be alone in this but the words “A film by Rob Zombie” already mean something to me.
Before you think I’m rushing to defend Madonna, may I just make this list; “Evita”, “Swept Away”, “Shanghai Surprise” and “Body of Evidence.” Crimes against cinema, one all. Certainly reason for banishment from the silver screen at best. Some have used these films as a cornerstone for their case for the restoration of the death penalty. Whilst I am no fan of Capital Punishment, their arguments have at least demanded I consider my position.
Mick Jagger may have given us a credible “Performance” but even he pretends that “Ned Kelly” never happened. He kept quiet until “Freejack” over a decade later. He needn’t have bothered; certainly, audiences were not.
Elvis Presley may have been the King of Rock and Roll but he may as well have thrown his crown in the bin when he answered Hollywood’s call. If he had only limited himself to “Flaming Star”, “Kid Creole” and “Jailhouse Rock”, we may have forgiven him. He didn’t and I, for one, cannot be charitable.
David Bowie has had a fair old run in the cinema. Let’s call him the exception to the rule whilst calling up a roll call of horror. From Cliff Richard, through Bob Dylan, David Essex, Gene Simmons, John Lydon, Mariah Carey and on to Britney Spears; it is a catalogue of atrocity.
David Johanson and Henry Rollins have managed to pick up a few odd bucks here and there through some nice cameo roles. Then again, the few of us who stand at the shrine of the New York Dolls and Black Flag are a far from massive posse.
Yes, my friends, acting is not an assured passage for the failing star. Even fewer have successfully followed a career into direction. David Byrne’s “True Stories” has its admirers but one can also find people who will pay good money to have unfeasibly large objects inserted into their recta.
Even the most hardened of masochists are unlikely to draw any pleasure from Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clare”. Despite the obsessive clamour of fans for the release of the man’s 292(!) minute opus, even Dylan is unwilling to test the patience of the marketplace and Dylan usually pays the marketplace no heed at all. That should be a warning.
That brings us to the strange and worrying case of one Rob Zombie. Rob used to sing with White Zombie and I would recommend their “More Human than Human” as the perfect music to bang your head to. Even an old fart like me cannot resist a bit of head spinning, hair flinging action when faced with the works of Messrs Zombie and Co. Rob also runs a side line in film direction and I have not come to bury the fucker; I have come to praise him.
Let me tell you about my experience of his debut feature “House of a Thousand Corpses”. When it was released on DVD, I picked it up off the shelf and gave it a curious glance. A complete stranger came running over to me and told me not to buy it. He said it was the worst film he had ever seen bar none. He was so moved by the sheer awfulness of this production to make it his life’s work to save others from its vileness and ineptitude.
I was impressed. How is that for advertising. If I’d have had the thirty seven bucks that JB Hi Fi were demanding, I would have picked it up there and then. A couple of days later, I was over at the Video Ezy and the chick behind the counter refused to rent the thing out to me. She couldn’t in all good conscience take money off a customer for trash such as this.
What the hell was going on? Well here is my twenty cents worth; “House of a Thousand Corpses” was the first decent horror film of this millennium. It has been a long time since a director arrived who could produce something of the calibre of Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, John Carpenter’s “Halloween”, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” or Cronenberg’s “Rabid”.
Yeah. It is that good. It is, however, recklessly amoral. Centring in on a peculiar quirk of Slasher flicks (the dispatch of repulsive victims who we wont really miss), we find ourselves quietly rooting for the psycho, hillbilly white-trash killers. They have the best jokes and all the best lines.
The police shoot out sequence delivered to the music of Slim Whitman’s “I Remember You” is an extraordinary piece of cinema worth the price of admission alone. It takes a pinch of Peckinpah and adds a massive dollop of David Lynch with the corouge to crane away from the violence. It will be copied for years to come.
The film echoes to hints of Tarantino, Argento and Bava. There’s a little bit of “Blood on Satan’s Claw” as well as a dash of Joe Dante and “Natural Born Killers”. All these influences are combined as a stunning whole; something much more than the sum of its parts.
Of course, you could write this off as a fluke. You could say that Zombie merely cobbled together the best bits from his favourite films and that I’m an idiot making shapes out of passing clouds. Okay. If that’s the case, explain “The Devil’s Rejects” to me.
When David Stratten got up on the Movie Show and gave the film an unprecedented zero stars, I was queuing up at the cinema. His was a review that went so far beyond prejudice that Zombie must have been doing something really right. You might call “The Devil’s Rejects” a sequel to “House of a Thousand Corpses” because, story wise, it follows its predecessor. In terms of tone, men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.
Are fun loving psychos are no longer fun. It is like finding the novel of your latest Hollywood blockbuster and discovering the author told a completely different story. The Firefly Family are scum and the police investigation includes a de-construction of the origins of the family name from Marx Brothers films.
Despite this redrawing of his characters, Zombie works even harder to make them his heroes. He achieves this by drawing the avenging police who pursue them as something far more monstrous than they are. The strangers they waylay along the road are far sleazier than they could ever be. It is a trick that not many directors would even try these days but the notion of the anti-hero is at the core of the film.
Instead of drawing cinematic influences from horror films, this time Zombie draws on a tradition of nineteen seventies anti-authority road movies. There’s a bit of everything from “Badlands”, “Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia” and “Sugarland Express” through to “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Thelma and Louise” and “Two-Lane Blacktop”. The ending is inevitable. The rain of bullets would be far less effective if they were righteously fired. This is a film that asks us to consider consequence.
Its Seventies soundtrack of southern style rock is a wonderful rediscovery and a perfect way of capturing the mood of the time. The Freebird sequence is another amazing piece of cinema. All in all, this is a great film. Of course, you don’t have to believe me. I could be alone in this but the words “A film by Rob Zombie” already mean something to me.
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Comment by Justin
In this, you have reversed all the bad publicity from which you have been served and now give life anew to the credibility of the film to which I actually feel like seeing now.
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
As for Devils Rejects, I understand that some people just wont get it.
Personally, I love the 70's retro credits and the balls to the wall attitude. The "FreeBird" finale blended sound and vision so well that I find myself grinning whenever I hear it since.
Sure its over the top, heavy handed and offensive but its also high energy filmmaking that does entertain.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Comment by Bob Short
I hope you enjoy the resurrected corpses of these films!
Dear Adrian.
"Living Dead Girl" is indeed cool but currently I have "Pussy Liquor" (from the House OST) on high rotation.
Dear John,
Throughout the 70s I learnt to despise Freebird. All the arsehole kids at school were into it and I was so pleased when the Sex Pistols came along. Then this film comes along and I, too, am humming the damn thing with a big old shit eating grin on my face. Life is pretty weird, yeah?