3rd time lucky?

It's so tempting to kick today off by ranting heartily about the apparent steady and alarming decent into utter idiocy that COVID19 is causing across the planet, but it's really far too easy of a target and I'm hoping most of you fine people are intellectually above the notion of panic buying all the loo roll you can get your hands on in case you end up shut in your house for the next 6-8 working months. At least if they run out of actual food they could just drink the 48 bottles of soap they just bought and it might alleviate the over-population crisis a touch, as well as raising the average IQ of the population a few notches.

So rather than kick dumb people while they're down, which is fun but ultimately a somewhat hollow victory, let us instead get back to the point and slap some movies soundly about the chops and chastise them for the misery they have inflicted upon the world. Except maybe today, not so much.

I've covered a couple of Rob Zombie movies and found them, well, somewhat lacking. I know people fawn over him, particularly within the Heavy Metal community (and it is a community) because of reasons, but somewhat like Tarantino, I just don't get it. Well, ordinarily. I think Zombie has turned out a couple of decent movies; Halloween was interesting and much better than he was given credit for (much better than most of the sequels at very least) and House of 1000 Corpses is a cult classic in as many senses of those words as you can think of (well, maybe two). In fact, that's where we begin this week's cinematic odyssey as I figured before I had a gander at 3 From Hell, it would make sense to give it's predecessors a quick once over.

I watched House of 1000 Corpses when it came out and remember being a bit bemused by how split the story is; you could have probably shaved the Dr Satan stuff off the end and had a fairly decent murder-family horror which wore its love for Texas Chainsaw Massacre openly on its disincorporated sleeves. Watching it again though, it feels a bit less clunky getting to that same point and is not a bad watch. It's a lot like I imagine you'd get if the Astro Creep 2000 album sleeve was actually a movie. Even Sheri Moon Zombie isn't completely horrendous, although her whole schtick is to be an obnoxious dickhead and that seems to be her entire acting style.

The Devil's Rejects is tonally a much different type of movie. 1000 Corpses is a grindhouse horror, but its sequel is more like an unhinged take on Smokey and the Bandit. It still has that 70's vibe and Zombie's penchant for awkward sex jokes delivered with the all panache and grace of a dozen bricks crafted into one giant brick, but is nonetheless not too bad. Again, never really got all the love but is well on the way to being a Cult classic in its own right.

Fast forward 10 years or so and 3 From Hell is upon us, with little fanfare it would seem. For those who haven't seen Devil's Rejects, saying the ending is pretty terminal would be an excruciating understatement and there really doesn't seem like there was any intent of following it up. Follow it they did however, so cue some relatively understated plot  acrobatics to get back into the story and we have what I can only really describe as a Prison drama/Western. 3 From Hell isn't really genre defining, but neither does it lend itself to easy categorisation; it is still undoubtedly a horror, but not straight down the line. It's most certainly a Rob Zombie movie, who I will admit is pretty good with visuals but is resolutely awful at writing dialogue. There are yet again some heavily cringe-inducing sex jokes, some terrible acting/scripting of the Baby character which I can't determine is down to the writing or Sheri Moon Zombie spreading her own brand of suck all over proceedings. Eventually Baby, Otis and Otis' hitherto unheard of half brother (Richard Brake replacing the very visibly, very actually and very sadly passed away not long after filming, ill Sid Haig but thankfully not as Captain Spaulding) flee to Mexico and it genuinely turns into some sort of OK Corral, honest to goodness Western, replete with gunfights, knife throwing, whores-a-go-go and of course the drug cartel leader is called El Satan, wears a suit and a Lucha Libre mask and has all his cronies do the same. I'm not calling cliché, but actually of course I'm totally calling cliché. It does all look pretty cool though. 

The weirdest thing here is that the story seems to want us to sympathise with the 3 as if they're heroes. They're surrounded by villains of various shapes and types; the greasy prison warden, the vindictive repressed lesbian prison guard, the holidaying douchebag all too quick to cheat on his wife, the drug cartel head honcho out for revenge. In a world of bad guys, these three cannibalistic, anarchist, psychotic nut jobs are the closest thing to good guys we're likely to get and we're expected to root for them. I guess the real trick is that you find yourself doing exactly that because I guess at least some of the people they murder along the way might have deserved it a little bit.

It's certainly an odd ride. These are easily the most compelling of Zombie's creations, so it's not hard to see why he keeps going back to them. I'd recommend watching all three of this saga in order (although not necessarily back to back unless you're a trooper) to get the best sense of the horrifying murder journey you're dragging yourself along. It certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea and honestly they aren't the kind of movies I'm likely to go back to over and over; compared to the rest of his output though, this feels like it's actually got some story behind it if you can stomach trudging through all the terrible pussy jokes.