Directed and written by Rob Zombie
Starring no one deserving of mention
Classification: R
Rating: *
Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark. Because the intention here is clear: Subbing acts of violence for those of sex, this is meant to be a porn flick, pure and dirty.
In that narrow sense, the movie succeeds admirably, adhering to the single principle that guides all pornography: repetition, the glorious act repeated over and over and over again. Everything else -- genre, narrative, character, theme, humour -- is not only secondary but irrelevant. Sure, these ingredients may be present in trace amounts to support the appearance of a story, but that's just a sop to a different convention and a higher aesthetic. In pornography, reality is reduced to that lone act, repeated obsessively and compulsively.
As for the arithmetical case of 1000 Corpses, the nominal genre is horror, but don't expect to be scared, or even disgusted, at least not for long. In this field of endeavour, any intense reaction is unsustainable, for the obvious reason that the guiding principle of repetition comes with an inevitable corollary and unavoidable side-effect -- sheer boredom. Yep, the prolonged consumption of porn demands an enormously high threshold of boredom. The censorious might want to bear that in mind: Why legislate against the stuff when it does such a superb job of legislating against itself?
Anyway, our writer-director here is the aptly named Rod Zombie, who definitely arrives qualified for the gig. You see, he used to be a heavy-metal rocker, and thus is intimately familiar with the theory of repetition, having pounded away at those same damn chords over and over and over again. This time, of course, he's playing in the key of gore and, toward that violent ideal, the script convenes a quorum of young victims and has them driving into redneck territory -- specifically, into the waiting guns and knives and axes of the hillbillies from hell. Let the reiteration begin. The lethal means may vary (shooting, torture, stabbed by objects sharp and thumped by instruments blunt) but the dead end has a certain sameness.
Along the way, that single-minded Zombie swipes every gimmick in the cinematic book of horrors -- jump cuts, blue filters, bleached stock, jump cuts, grainy video, slow-mo, and did I mention jump cuts? He's not without a small talent, although its sporadic flashes may be more random than calculated. Think of it as the filmic equivalent of 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 keyboards occasionally whacking out a coherent word. Too bad one of them wasn't STOP.
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