Rob Zombie is living proof that art inspires itself. As a hardcore horror fan, he turned his interests into a lucrative music career spanning nearly three decades now, beginning as the lead vocalist in the band White Zombie and now writing solo albums that blend the macabre with danceable metal hooks. With a cult following behind White Zombie and several solo albums in the mainstream, not to mention successful tours under his belt, “Zombie” has turned his attention back to the very thing he first drew his inspiration from – the horror film. Using the money raised by his musical endeavors, he decided to make some of his own, of which “The House of 1,000 Corpses” is the first. Now, one who is familiar with Mr. Zombie’s music might think they would know what to expect from a Rob Zombie film, as his songs typically deal with similar themes even though they carry different subject matter. The sex, dread, and sleazy menace Zombie sings, writes, and draws about can all be found here, but given the credentials of the director, the film is rather disappointing, as it fails to live up to the expectations one would have of a genuine and clever horror fan making his own film.

You would think a man like Zombie would know the ins and outs of horror, but this film is decidedly devoid of anything truly scary. Instead, the film acts like a showcase of deeply disturbed deviant behavior, and violence perpetuated on the unassuming. Pair of young couples are on a cross-country trip, documenting bizarre roadside attractions for a book they are writing. On the way home on Halloween eve, they stop for gas at a bizarre tourist trap owned by redneck clown Captain Spaulding. Billed as a “murder ride”, the attraction teaches the young couple about several infamous local murderers and their depraved acts, and the legend surrounding one of them, a Dr. Satan, intrigues them enough to go on a detour to look for landmarks Captain Spaulding mentioned in his tale. A series of events leads to their car breaking down and them falling in with the Firefly clan, who turn out to be a family of crazed psychotics.

That’s the plot, in a nutshell. If it seems tired or disjointed, that would be because it is. Rather than flowing into an escalating series of dreadful circumstances like you would expect of most horror films, “House” seems more like a collection of scenes and half-realized ideas that have been edited together to tell a story. Nothing that happens in the film seems particularly related to anything else. For example, Captain Spaulding and his spiel about Dr. Satan are both discarded by the plot in favor for the twisted depredations of the Firefly family. When Dr. Satan is re-introduced later on in the film, it feels like watching a scene from a completely different movie. Nothing much is ever really explained, so there is little in the film’s progressing plot that actually makes sense. The “horror” comes into play in the sense of exploitation and torture, and while these scenes are uncomfortable, disturbing, and gross, they don’t have all that much impact, as only the means are given any detail; never the ends.  Also, the victim characters are all terribly unsympathetic because the acting from the villains all steals the show.

Even though this film recycles the common horror theme of “backwoods country redneck deviants” without ever doing anything new, the actors somehow manage to put some real character into their parts, which makes them stand out from the usual morass of backwoods horror victims. Captain Spaulding has a sharp wit and a larger than life attitude and has some of the best scenes in the film despite his being seemingly unrelated to the film’s main antagonists. The Fireflies are the star villains, a clan of rednecks living in an isolated area where they can literally get away with murder. They are led by the anarchist Otis, who practices nonconformity in the extreme; to the point that he enjoys terrorizing and murdering and playing with the corpses of those who don’t agree with him. His behavior is tolerated by the rest of the family, although his sister “Baby” is equally as sadistic. A bombshell with a killer body and a cheerful, bubbly personality, she isn’t afraid to test the boundaries of decency and enjoys playfully murdering folks from time to time. The third is the horribly scarred and silent “Tiny”, a hulking monster who is actually seemingly passive when left to his own devices. They are rounded out by their mother, who seems practical yet enabling of their darker habits, and their foul grandfather, who couldn’t seem to care less about anything.  It is quite obvious that the Fireflys were inspired by the Mansons, and there are several in-film allusions to this that are anything but subtle. However, the actors still manage to pull off their parts with loads of originality, which helps elevate this film somewhat despite its lack of real substance.

Another good thing about this film is the presentation, which is the only aspect of the film in which Zombie does what you would expect of him. He pulls out a lot of old-school artistic techniques while putting together the film, such as rendering some scenes in negative, using split panels, showing brief flashbacks and flash-forwards in the place of scene transitions, using “home footage” diary videos of members of the Firefly clan for the same effects (another homage to the Manson murderers)…All the techniques of filming that hearken back to true old-school horror flicks. The costuming is another part of the film that was done right. Everyone looks fantastic in each of the scenes; though some plot points may be out of place, it never looks as though any of the characters are.

To be quite honest, watching this film made me feel like Rob Zombie fell into the trap of trying to tie together too many ideas and then retroactively going back and trying to get them to mesh. This being his first outing as a director, I suppose he can be forgiven, as there are plenty of worse films out there than this one. It is still an entertaining film, it just isn’t what one would expect from a guy who really loves horror films…or maybe it is, as it has the feel of a fan-made video hidden behind the veneer of a professional production.

Hard Stats:

Producer: Universal Pictures (distributed by Lion's Gate Films)
Director: Rob Zombie
Screenwriter: Rob Zombie

Cast:

Chris Hardwick - Jerry Goldsmith
Rainn Wilson - Bill Hudley
Erin Daniells - Denise Willis
Jennifer Jostyn - Mary Knowles
Sid Haig - Captain Spaulding
Bill Moseley - Otis B. Driftwood
Sherri Moon Zombie - Baby Firefly
Robert Allen Mukues - Rufus "RJ" Firefly Jr.
Matthew McGrory - Tiny Firefly
Karen Black - Mother Firefly
Dennis Fimple - Grandpa Hugo
Walter Phelan - Dr. Satan

Trivia:

Sherri Moon Zombie, who makes her feature film debut in this film, is Rob Zombie's wife.

This was Dennis Fimple's last film, and is dedicated to him.

Several characters are named after characters that appeared in Marx Brothers films.

During its box office run, the film encountered two instances of the number '666'. The first was when the film grossed $3,460,666 on its opening weekend, and the second was when the theater average income for the film was found to be $666.

The Firefly House is actually the same house used in the film "The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas", and is a part of Universal Studios' theme park in Orlando, Florida. Universal would not close the house to visitors during filming, so many scenes for this film were delayed.

The film was actually completed in 2000, but was ultimately rejected by Universal Studios, which believed the film would receive an NC-17 rating (which it did). It took two years before Zombie found a distributer willing to publish it in Lion's Gate Entertainment.

As one might expect, Rob Zombie wrote and performed most of the songs on the soundtrack.