The lame, derivative captivity flick id Rob Zombie’s debut feature, and the only things worse than a piece of garbage: a piece of garbage that tries to make up for being a piece of garbage by being highly stylized garbage. Needles video effects, split screens like it’s a music video, etc. Plus “artsy” effects like weird interstitials of characters, some of whom otherwise aren’t even in the movie, overacting and doing “scary” improv, preaching about the end of the world or talking about killing people for sport, all sorts of hammy horseshit designed to compensate for really not knowing how to make a movie. It’s all style, no substance, and the style really isn’t very good. Like, when the heroine finds the operating theater and discovers her boyfriend being lobotomized by a corpselike surgeon in an exoskeleton, a good director wouldn’t really need to shift to solarized video to underscore it. Flipping back and forth to garish colors for a second somehow just isn’t scary.
Overall it reminds me of being in 9th grade, when I used to scrawl Who lyrics on school desks. I didn’t know how to write a song, so I wrote down someone else’s songs. That’s kind of what it feels like Zombie is doing here, but with ’70s horror/exploitation flicks instead of “905”. (Yeah, that was my favorite Who song at 14.) He throws virtually every cliche in the genre, all amped up to 11 with the same cartoonishness with which he made scare-quoted “heavy metal” in his band White Zombie. By the time things get really baroque towards the end, and they break out the big sets and high weirdness, I’d already stopped caring.
Funny, by the way, for having early performances by a couple of people who became more famous later: a pre-“Office” Rainn Wilson is one of the leads, perennial tough guy (and sometime tranny, in “Sons Of Anarchy”) Walton Goggins is in it for a bit as a country cop, plus of course Karen Black and Sid Haig and Bill Moseley and all those “icons” who are supposed to make a horror movie great simply by being in it, as if we haven’t noticed that most of their movies are all usually pretty bad.
One thing I’ll say is, of all these people, Bill Moseley is pretty much always pretty good. And even Bill Moseley is terrible in this.
I do feel it’s worth mentioning that, strangely, the sequel, “The Devil’s Rejects”, is absolutely great, and is the only thing Rob Zombie has ever done that I’ve actually liked. And, boy, do I like that one. This first effort, though, is not just garbage, it revels in being garbage as if that excuses it being garbage. That doesn’t fly with me.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did it much more low-key (if you can imagine a movie next to which Texas Chainsaw seems “low-key”) and much more effectively.