House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Director: Rob Zombie

Viewed on: Shudder

 

Summary: A group of tourists checking out local spooky attractions meet up with an unpleasant family and get a lot more spook than they bargained for. The father of one of the tourists tries to save the group and things escalate horribly.

 

Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses is a movie that I went into with high hopes. I had seen and enjoyed the sequel, The Devil’s Rejects, years ago but I do remember enjoying the creepy adventures of Captain Spaulding and his murder family. That’s mostly what got me interested in seeing this movie, that and I am somewhat familiar with the negative reception that this movie has received, as opposed to the more positive reactions that Devil’s Rejects was met with, if I recall correctly. That may be a fun movie to revisit, but that’s a topic for another day.

House of 1000 Corpses follows a quartet of tourists (Jerry, Bill, Mary and Denise) on a cross country road trip who are researching roadside locations and mysterious stops so that they can write a book about those kinds of places. The stop that we follow them to is a gas station/fried chicken joint where Captain Spaulding runs “The Museum of Monsters and Madmen,” an attraction that quickly grabs the attention of the group and they take the wonderfully hokey theme park ride that guides them through an exhibition of famous murderers, ending with a description of a local urban legend, Dr. Satan. Jerry is enthralled by the story of Dr. Satan’s twisted medical experiments and his lynching and is eventually able to get Spaulding to reveal the location of the tree where Dr. Satan was killed. On the way over, a storm breaks and the crew decide to pick up a hitchhiker caught out in the rain. The hitchhiker, whose name is revealed to be Baby, is familiar with the tree and offers to guide them to it, but ends up guiding them into a trap laid by her twisted family. As the group struggles against these real life monsters and madmen, it’s a race against the clock for Denise’s father and the police he enlists to find her and her friends.

 

There isn’t a ton of plot to dissect so let’s focus on the performances first. First and foremost I need to profess my love for Sid Haig, the actor playing Captain Spaulding. Sid Haig is truly a B-movie legend and it is just a treat whenever he is on screen, combining intensity with comedic timing and charisma. He completely sells the character of a larger than life carnival barker in a backwoods town who makes his living telling tales to passing tourists. All the members of the hitchhiker’s family, the Firefly clan, all range from acceptable to good, but they generally don’t make the same impression as Spaulding, though that might be because their dialogue wasn’t nearly as good as the lines that Haig had to work with. It is occasionally frustrating, as the actors portraying the characters Baby and Otis, Sherri Moon Zombie and Bill Moseley respectively, are just struggling tooth and nail against their thinly written characters to bring something more to two of the most interesting members of the Firefly clan to the surface, with mixed success.

 

All the characters that we meet at the Firefly household tend to have the same problem when it comes to establishing who they are and what they’re about. Captain Spaulding was a fully fleshed out character whose eccentricities hint at a lot of depth that we don’t really see from a lot of other characters in the movie. The four tourist travelers are a prime example of this, as they have traits but are never given fully formed characters so it is difficult to get invested in them or their problems when I don’t know know much about them or who they were before the movie started. We get glimpses every now and then of character traits, such as Jerry being irresponsible and having his head in the clouds, Denise is sensible and suspicious, but these traits never solidify into full characters.

 

This isn’t to say that the whole movie is bad, there are a lot of things in there that I enjoyed quite a bit. There is an interesting thread throughout the movie about the collision between old world Americana and values clashing with a modern world that has left them behind. Captain Spaulding in particular personifies this conflict as he’s seemingly caught between the two, managing a roadside tourist attraction that packages the strange old world urban legends in order to sell that to tourists interested in kitschy junk. Spaulding is happy to sell knick knacks and urban legends to these people but he starts getting a bit testy with them when they want to know more, when they want the truth about what happened. There’s even a bit where Spaulding shows off his John Wayne tattoo! In that same vein the Firefly family house is this old dilapidated place filled with junk and remnants of years gone by. This conflict is further established by Otis.

 

Otis has a monologue directed towards one of the tourists about how he works for a living and none of these pampered tourist kids know what real work is. There is a lot that can be read about class strife and the struggles between “country” America that is just trying to make ends meet and keep food on the table and “city” America that takes all that for granted. Unfortunately this is overshadowed by the fact that this entire subtext is just taken from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie that heavily inspired House of 1000 Corpses and is much better. It is very easy to compare the two films and it seems like House of 1000 Corpses is almost a remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the focus more on the murderous family than the tourists. I totally understand loving Texas Chainsaw Massacre and wanting to homage it, but there isn’t enough to give the movie its own sense of identity.

 

Speaking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there is one thing that Rob Zombie definitely did not take from that movie, and that is the restraint to know when you should and should not show the audience shocking things. House of 1000 Corpses was controversial when it first came out because of the graphic and shocking content in it with regards to violence and sexuality. Seeing it 15 years after it first came out though, it doesn’t seem as shocking to me as it was presented to be. Movies have been experimenting more and more with presenting shocking violence and disturbing sexual content and it kind of highlights the limitations of relying on these things to sell your movie, your movie will only shock people so long as more shocking movies don’t come out to overshadow it. Contrast that with how the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre has very little explicit gore and relies much more heavily on its sense of isolation and vulnerability to create horror. Gore of course still has its place in horror, but it has to be used intelligently to create the effect it was intended to have, and that doesn’t come across clearly in House of 1000 Corpses.

 

Approaching the film more from the villains’ perspectives than the protagonists’ was an interesting idea and I wish there was more meat to their characters, more character weight than people being horribly cruel to other human beings for no real established reason. Really it’s the execution of these ideas that I found lacking and I can’t be happy about a movie having good ideas if none of them are executed well. I don’t just have negatives to remark on though, some of the performances are quite good, the first 15 minutes with Captain Spaulding are a blast, and the pacing is quick and clean. There are a lot of good ideas here but that may have been Rob Zombie’s downfall. He tried to fit too many good ideas in one movie and those good ideas don’t have the time to breathe and evolve into the great cinema that they could have.