I'll never know what horror fans did to deserve Rob Zombie, the rock star turned amateur-night auteur of grindhouse splatterfests.......
As a writer-director, he's what you'd call....um.....an acquired taste. His always overlong films arrive awash in gallons of gore, dialogue mostly made up of spewed, F-laced invective, and a very bottom of the abyss outlook on humanity. And they usually feature clownish, maladroit performances by his monumentally untalented wife, Sheri Moon Zombie.
His films devolve into endurance tests, since there's never any character even remotely resembling a real human being. In each of his films, innocent victims line up like bowling alley ten pints, waiting their turn to be shot, stabbed or eviscerated while still alive. But as conceived by Zombie, these luckless souls appear only slightly less repulsive and obnoxious then the maniacs who slaughter them.
So the films end up as nothing more than the lowest grade geek-a-paloozas, parading their cruelty and ultra-violence for and hoots and giggles of gorehounds.
Prime example, his "Firefly" trilogy, following the blood soaked path of an entire family of demented serial killers.
We start with 'House Of 1000 Corpses" (2003, in which a carload of fresh victims foolishly visit a house that's actually an all purpose human abattoir for the Firefly family, whose men are named after Groucho Marx characters....(Captain Spaulding, Otis P. Driftwood....yuk, yuk...)
Having already raped and chopped up a batch of cheerleaders, the Fireflies go about their business of serving up similar services to the newly arrived carload bunch.
Moment of deep irony: Universal, the film original distributor, dropped it as a sludge too far, but continues to use the film as an inspirations for its Halloween season theme park festivities....
Moving right along, in The Devil's Rejects (2005) the gang hits the road when their latest homestead is raided by the enraged-to-the-point-of-mania Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), seeking revenge for his brother slaughtered in the previous film.
They stop at a seedy motel long enough to torture and butcher the other guests......but then they run afoul of the vengeful Wydell, who's employed his own pair of freelance maniacs, including that forever grindhouse favorite, Danny Trejo. Making a desperate escape via Cadillac convertible, they're met by an army of cops, who promptly perforate them with twice the bullet holes pumped into Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at the end of "Bonnie And Clyde"
From that finale, you'd think that's the very end of the Firelies....but think again....heh, heh, heh..
In the trilogy's finale (?), "3 From Hell" (2019), writer-director Zombie must put a lot of faith in modern medicine, since he asks an audience to believe that the loony gore-meisters survived and recovered from those 3000 bullet wounds........ and now sit in prison.
Yeah.....right.
Since an ailing, soon to pass away Sid Haig, could only make a brief early appearance as Captain Spaulding. further slaying duties fell to Winslow Foxworth Coltrane (Richard Brake) Along with Otis (Bill Mosely) and perpetually manic Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie), they easily escape prison to litter up the film with more carnage,
Zombie goes to the outer edges of patience-testing with the film's long, long third act, with the gang seeking refuge across the border in Mexico. Once there, they engage in an epic bloodbath firefight with a Mexican gang all outfitted as Lucha Libre wrestlers. No doubt inspired by the shootouts in "The Wild Bunch" and "Extreme Prejudice", Zombie drags this episode out for nearly an eternity,
And any viewers who've become, over course of the trilogy,uer454tfgb increasingly annoyed at Sheri Moon Zombie's junior high school level overacting, will likely suffer far worse than the shot-up-to-hell Luchadors.
There's simply no middle ground in assessing these three films. Either you fully embrace Rob Zombie's puerile, cartoon-ish approach to horror or you'll feel like you're stuck in the lowest of the low carnival sideshow that never ends.
For those who dig this stuff, I'd guess 3 stars (***) apiece for each of the three films....
For those who don't, take heed from this BQ warning....consider each film more than earns their status as an AFH...each a gold plated ABOMINATION FROM HELL.
So no hooray for Captain Spaulding.......
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