The past is a lonely place to visit. It is a treacherous place too - fragile, fleeting and full of holes. And you must go there alone. You can sit with an old friend, sure; drink a coffee and reminisce. But for all that you may have shared the same experiences, their past is not your past. Their stories are not your stories. The past does not exist, not in any real tangible way and the future is nothing more than a concept. Only the present is real and it is a slippery thing indeed - point to a single moment and it's gone as soon as it can be identified. But the past, your past, is only words and memories. And it is all in you.
When I first came to Wellington my then-partner and I moved into a two bedroom flat at the ugly end of a beautiful street. The road that ran past the flat was always busy and every night I fell asleep to the sound of cars. It was in Lower Hutt and anyone who is familiar with Wellington will know that 'Lower Hutt' is not a good thing to put on your address. It has a certain reputation - at least somewhat deserved. But for all that we would often walk home late at night along those streets we never saw or encountered anything bad. For the most part those streets were pretty empty after a certain hour and there were never any signs of trouble. We had very little money. No car. On weekends (or whatever days off we shared) we would often walk the short distance to the Queensgate shopping centre. There was a little joint there where they did the best fried chicken I've ever tasted. The skin was really crackly, crisp and savoury. When you bit through it all the clear, fatty juices would trickle out from underneath that skin. It would come with a huge platter of thick-cut fries, heaped with chicken salt. While you ate it the whole experience was bliss itself. It wasn't long afterwards, however, that you'd feel it - that bloated tightness in the gut that comes from eating something really freaking unhealthy. I used to rub my stomach and joke that the chicken was fighting back. Truth is, that chicken had probably had a short and deeply unhappy life and was completely justified in seeking some form of post-mortem revenge. But then the place changed hands and venue and the chicken just wasn't the same - the skin was greasier, the portions meaner, the chips soggy and unsatisfying. We stopped going there.
I was getting too old to keep eating that junk anyway.
Queensgate itself has become a whole other thing from how it was back in those days. Now it's at least twice the size, two-storied: a looming concrete edifice that squats in the heart of the Hutt.
And the cinema we used to go to is long gone now.
It was a weary little Hoyts venue - back when Hoyts still existed for Wellington. It was tucked away, near-as-dammit hidden, inside a worn-out arcade. There seemed to be only one person who worked there; a middle-aged woman who worked the ticket booth and the candy bar. She never tried to upsell us a damn thing, never asked how our day was going, seldom made eye-contact. We both thought she was fantastic. Most days the theatre was all but empty and we had the run of the place. Heck, the only time I ever saw it close-to-capacity was when they screened 'Freddy Versus Jason'; horror movies always brought out the Hutt crowd. The floor was so sticky that my shoes would make a little tearing sound whenever I lifted them from the carpet. But the picture and sound were good. And it felt like ours.
We saw 'House of 1,000 Corpses' there. It was a movie I'd been eager as hell to see. For a start, that is hands-down the finest horror flick title that I can readily think of: it just drips venom and menace and a sense of real danger. The early trailers and teasers had made it look grainy, gleeful and garish; a snarling throwback to the grimy exploitation flicks of the seventies and eighties but twisted and refracted through the post-modern styling of 'Natural Born Killers' and like a billion MTV videos (back when MTV still played music videos, that is). It looked set to restore some bite and danger to a genre that had become too polished, pre-packaged and safe. This was a horror flick made by an obsessive - someone who'd lived and breathed this stuff - who knew the tricks and the traps of the genre - a dude who knew how to give such a flick teeth and could teach it to bite. That someone, of course, being musician Rob Zombie whose music I'd always dug and who had directed a handful of his own music clips - which were, simply, kick-ass.
So we sat there, my feet making those little tearing sounds every time I shifted, and watched this long-awaited, much-delayed movie.
And we both kind of hated it.
My first impression of the film was that it was too ugly, too sordid. It struck me that the characters were not sufficiently developed - the protagonists that is; Zombie clearly loves his villains. It looked fantastic - a cut-and-paste collage of different styles, film stocks and camera angles, and it possessed a genuinely unhinged fever-dream quality that lingered long afterwards. But ultimately it left me feeling dirty, cheated. Betrayed somehow. It wasn't the film I expected to see. There was a nihilism there, a sense of futility that left a very sour taste inside my skull.
So, I was disappointed.
But the past is a lonely place...
Recently I watched Zombie's latest film 'The Lords of Salem'. I found it haunting, demented, oddly poignant and utterly visceral. It was an occult horror flick that variously seemed to recall 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Repulsion', 'The Sentinel', and 'Suspiria' all twisted and corrupted by the late, great Ken Russell. It still felt like a pastiche - like a love letter to a genre written by someone so deeply embedded in it that he couldn't see any way clear. But. That. Worked. And it worked brilliantly. What lingered with me the most from that film was that it basically lived or died by the characters within the narrative. There was a complexity and a richness to them that was almost wholly unexpected, and they were so full of sadness, so fragile and weirdly believable.
So, consider that my recommendation.
But it also got me thinking about the look and feel of 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and I realized that the reason I'd felt betrayed by it was that it hadn't been the film I expected to see (I did a similar thing with Alex de la Iglesia's stunning 'The Last Circus' a couple of years ago: the first time I watched it I was left feeling angry, the second time I realized it was a masterpiece).
That is a stupid way to judge a film.
I thought about it's downbeat tone and it's sense of encroaching hopelessness; whether he intended to or not Zombie might have pioneered the "torture-porn" movement - though 'House...' is not nearly as graphically violent as that sub-genre tends to be.
It also occurred to me: for all that folks tend to point to 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' as the single biggest influence on his work I suspect he may be a bigger fan of that film's sequel (a film, I myself, have very fond memories of). Just so you know, 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre II' effectively parodies the first film - it paints the characters broader, bloodier and with a bolder brush. The black comedy already present in the first film is far more apparent in the sequel (it's also every bit as gore-soaked and violent as 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' was reputed to be, but actually was not). But seriously, considering the blatant pun used for the murderous family's last name (Sawyer, really?) humour was always kind of a thing for Tobe Hooper.
There are echoes of TCMII throughout much of Zombie's work. The increasingly deranged cop in pursuit of the Firefly family in 'The Devil's Rejects' recalls Dennis Hopper's lunatic chainsaw-wielding sheriff. The house in 'House of 1,000 Corpses' is closer to the phantasmagorical style of the abandoned amusement-park-cum-house-of-very-real-horrors in TCMII. Heck, even the set up of 'The Lords of Salem' (a female DJ getting hold of a recording that propels her into the nightmarish narrative) is reminiscent of Stretch's plight in TCMII.
Oh yeah, plus he's nabbed one of the cast of TCMII for 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and 'The Devil's Rejects' - Mr Bill Moseley.
Anyway, all that aside. I decided it was time to take another trip into the 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and see if, all these years on, there were fresh horrors and revelations to be had.
The flick is set during the Seventies; which provides the design team with ample gaudy set-dressing and inspired costumes. A couple of sci-fi and horror-loving dudes (one of whom is Rainn Wilson!) are drifting across country, recording their observations on out-of-the-way rural attractions. They've dragged their long suffering girlfriends along for the journey, on their way out to meeting the father of one of the women. The four of them bicker. They banter. They run low on gas. This leads them to Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen (and fried chicken grease-pit).
Spaulding (Sid Haig) is a surly guy with a mouthful of bad teeth and a faceful of leering clown makeup. We know there's a dangerous man behind that greasepaint as we've just seen him lay waste to a couple of would-be robbers. Hell, their blood is still wet on the floor when our carload of spam-to-be arrives on his doorstep. He has a murder-train out back that takes them on a tour of serial killers, all bathed in burning, psychedelic light. Spaulding tells them the tale of an infamous local madman known as Doctor Satan. Legend has it he experimented on the mentally-ill at the nearby asylum - monstrous, Mengele-style experiments designed to create a master race, or something. Inevitably Doctor Satan's crimes were revealed and vigilante justice prevailed - he was strung from a tree by a vengeful mob. Then his body disappeared.
You just know our kids (okay, the two dudes - their girlfriends are less than smitten with the idea) are going to want to take a look at that tree. Spaulding begrudgingly draws them a map. Pretty soon its raining hard and they're half-lost. On the way they pick up a hitch-hiker - a strange, seemingly demented lass with a cowboy hat and a shrill giggle (Sherri Moon - the director's wife).
Things do not go well.
A man in a frigging bear-head hood shoots out their tyre and the hitch-hiker leads them to her house, not far from where they're crashed-out. And so they are introduced to the Firefly family - a sneering gallery of grotesques; from the murderous matriarch (horror veteran Karen Black); the straggle-haired and lunatic prophet Otis (Moseley); to the looming crooked thing they call Tiny, whose body is warped and rubbery with scar tissue from when their father tried to burn down the house with all inside. The Fireflys already have some guests - a small group of abducted cheerleaders. Some of whom are already in pieces.
Okay, so the narrative taps into, like, half-a-dozen genre tropes. It's more-or-less a manic reworking of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' but there is something else here - something smarter and savvier and weirdly inspiring. The film rapidly descends into an ever-tightening vortex - part nightmare, part fugue. 'House...' hits us with a series of blasted and lingering images: buckled papier-mâché masks, rabbit suits, mutilated dolls and occult rituals. A killer taunts his victim while wearing her father's dead face ('who's your daddy?'). A makeshift coffin is lowered into a wet pit of writhing...what...zombies?...ghouls?...failed experiments? A subterranean cathedral adorned with bones recalls the crypt of the Capuchin monks in Rome - the Bone Chapel.
Oh it's a horror flick all right, but what sub-genre within the genre?
'House...' transitions from slasher flick to torture porn to supernatural horror. 'It's all true. The boogeyman is real...and you've found him'. The final fifteen minutes certainly divided fans - some seeing it as the film collapsing into incoherence.
For myself it absolutely enhances the immersive experience.
It is the final tumble down an altogether darker rabbit-hole.
The last stop on this gnashing ghost-train ride.
While undeniably graphic there is more emphasis on queasy psychological dread here than would be exhibited in later (mainly within the torture-porn movement) films. There is a real sense of vitality and madness - from the cavalcade of cut-and-paste imagery (split-screen, reverse-negative, solarisation, the surreal and saturated colour scheme, continual cutaways; to excerpts shot on grainy film; stock footage; and sequences found God only knows where). It's a leering, dangerous and singular vision.
The soundtrack is inspired, while heavily reliant on Rob Zombie's own tracks (a trick he wouldn't repeat in subsequent scores). Here we have grinding rock, clanking industrial textures, and gleefully ironic choices ('I just Wanna Be Loved By You', 'I Remember You').
And that is delightfully inappropriate use of 'Brick House'. I just have to say...
It's not a perfect film. Heck, one scene feels like it only exists so Zombie can shoe-horn in his beloved 'Pussy Liquor' pun (and linger on yet another close-up of Moon's derriere). The 'girlfriend' roles are underdeveloped and largely interchangeable - to the point that it wasn't until the second viewing that I could be sure which one was the survivor girl. Also, while the film is dense with dread it is rather thin on tension; it never feels like our protagonists stand a chance against the assembled might of the Firefly clan. Moon's demented giggling does get a little grating - though it is a nice nod to the possessed woman in 'The Evil Dead'. And - as has been often pointed out - the core plot is derivative. But it's a wild ride, man, and one that deserves a little respect.
Zombie is a clever guy, while undeniably light on subtlety. He's definitely no charlatan; no pretender to the throne; no Eli Roth. In fact, on the basis of this re-watching (and my opinion of 'Lords of Salem') I would rate him as one of the boldest and most exciting directors working within the genre today. I haven't seen 'The Devil's Rejects' yet; and even Ebert rated that one (albeit with a considerable caveat).
Well, memory certainly is a treacherous thing. A decade on and the my re-watching of the flick doesn't just alter my first impression of it; it blasts it into a smoking, howling ruin.
Rob Zombie's cinematic debut is a delirious, poison-hearted marvel.
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