Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
Horror Marathon #1
Interesting grindhouse hicksploitation/splatter homage in which -- oh, guess. Did you guess that a small group of disbelieving city slickers get murdered by psychopathic rednecks? You win a cookie.
It's fair to say that I am not the target audience: I haven't seen most of the movies it references, not even Texas Chainsaw Massacre; my main reason for seeing it was actually the Marx Brothers connection (the characters included Captain Spaulding and The Professor, Rufus T. Firefly and Otis B. Driftwood). Being unfamiliar with the genre, I'm finding it hard to judge.
Rob Zombie began his directorial career in music videos, and it shows: he favours fast cuts and camera tricks, including hand-held montages and colour-inverted dream/hallucination sequences, spaced apparently at random. The upside to this is a nervous tension, exacerbated by the scattershot approach to plot. It's impossible to predict what will happen next, or how; Zombie happily ignores conventions of film grammar and pace. But the downside is nervous exhaustion: there's no anticipation before the money-shot, just a cut from one to the next. It's too fast, too much, like a carnival sideshow.
How much credit is he due? How far is the film a successful excersive in subverting genre convention, and how far a failed exercise in feature-length music video?
There's an analysis to be made, based on the opening robbery scene. It's a hilarious scene, and we enjoy Spaulding turning the tables on his attackers: we laugh and cheer at his blasé use of excessive force. We become complicit with the violence, but that complicity becomes harder as the same violence is turned on us. It's hard to imagine four victims better as audience surrogates than these: one is a real horror buff, who "lives for this stuff"; one prefers science fiction, but goes along for the ride; the other two don't want to be there at all, but go along with the crowd. That the audience surrogates are assaulted is only incidental to the attack on the audience itself, particularly through the graveyard descent into Dr. Satan's nightmarish mutant hell. Don't you see, it's genius! It's f it seems to be irrational nonsense, that's the point: it's disorienting, unsettling horror, and it does far more damage than suspenseful sense.
Or maybe it's just bad. How charitable do you want to be? I can't decide either way. It was interesting; that's all I've got. For me, interesting is enough.