house of 1000 lame

Anyone who says they pay for 700 channels of cable and never find anything to watch just aren't looking hard enough. Give me 35 channels and I can find something to waste my time on. Hell, when all I had was a pair of rabbit ears that only picked up four of the six shitty local channels, I still found something--reruns of Seinfeld, an infomercial, some sort of home shopping network, the crazy ass religious guy. TV, like most things, requires setting your mind to it (and then abruptly shutting it off). If you're going to do it, don't procrastinate, just apply yourself, sit back, tune in and y'know tune out.

This brings me to Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, which is on as I type (that's how I roll). When I first heard Rob Zombie was doing a horror movie, I was stoked. Not because I was a big Rob Zombie fan, but he had that kind of splatter house, gore hound horror aesthetic about him. I knew he was a big fan of horror movies, and from seeing his illustrations, I figured his horror movie would be the right mix of camp, exploitation and gratuitous splatter. House of 1000 Corpses has all of these things, and still manages to suck.

Okay, so it's got a brutal clown dude, hapless teenagers, plenty of blood an' killings, kidnapped cheerleaders, some wack-job who looks kinda like Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show, "the Legend of Dr. Satan," and a hot-as-fuck scream queen in a cowboy hat (she even shows her boobies (I know, I'm 12)). Honestly, if you can't make those elements work, your filmmaker priviledges should be revoked.

The first thing that tipped me off that House of 1000 Corpses was going to be a raging disappointment was that I'd heard that the movie had to be seriously fucked with because it was "too extreme" or something like that, and Zombie was all pissed at the studio about it. I thought that might be insider code for "yeah, this is awful, so now we're all trying to save face." But I think the blame for this stinker has to fall solely on the shoulders of Mr. Zombie. He's got a habit of using either pointless split screens or poorly placed intercuts of grainy footage and pastel-ish negative filters that, I would guess, are supposed to show a particular character's mental state, or a flashback, or to set a mood, or...I don't know, honestly what they're there for. I'm guessing they're supposed to either make the film more arty or to make it look more like a music video. It's easy to confuse the two. Either way, for shame, Mr. Zombie.

Anyway, the point is, I don't like this movie at all, really, but still, I sit here watching it, serving as living proof that you can accomplish anything, no matter how menial, if you just set your mind to it.