Movie: House of 1000 Corpses

I haven't written any movie reviews in a while, and this blog has been a little behind on content lately, so I figured I'd get back into my thoughts on what I've been watching.

A few months ago, I got a subscription to Netflix so I could catch up on movies I didn't want to buy and I didn't want to waste my time to rent. House of 1000 Corpses was one of those, but of the movies I've gotten from Netflix, it's the only one I think I would buy, if the price was right.

The plot of the movie is largely summed up in the title: like the ax-murderer horror movies of the 1970s, four kids stop at a roadside attraction and end up prisoners of a deranged family in the title house. I didn't count, but there may very well have been a thousand corpses there. It's a raw horror film with zero hope, as it's pretty clear from about twenty minutes in that the main characters are well and rightly fucked (by their own stupidity as much as anything else). Calling it a gorefest doesn't do it justice, as it's relatively light on the gore; instead, it's a repeated, crushing nightmare of human depravity, made all the worse because there isn't some supernatural force behind it: as is implied in the beginning, everything that happens, can (and has) happen(ed) from the hands of regular human beings.

Director Rob Zombie, formerly of the band White Zombie, has a strong, if frentic, screen presence. The cuts are quick, and he makes excellent use both of hallucinagenic-like cut scenes (often with regular character dialogue still occuring), and of split-screen scenes showing reactions of characters to the horror other characters are inflicting on them.

I certainly won't say House is for everyone - in fact, I can only think of a couple of people I would recommend it to - but if you're a horror fan, this is certainly one of the better American horror movie offerings to come along in quite a while.