"Five carnival workers are kidnapped and held hostage in an abandoned, Hell-like compound where they are forced to participate in a violent game, the goal of which is to survive twelve hours against a gang of sadistic clowns."
Yet another adaptation of "The Most Dangerous Game", but this time populated with the usual American white trash characters and psycho clowns which are the norm for Rob Zombie's movies. Maybe he has something against Juggalos, or maybe he likes them? I really don't know. What's far more evident is how there isn't a whole lot of anything very original about "31".
In other words, "31" is Rob Zombie's version of "Hostel" and "The Running Man" with his very beautiful wife Sheri Moon Zombie as the star, and Malcolm McDowell picking up a pay cheque for doing not very much except play dress-up and chew scenery in the background.
Jeff Daniel Phillips as Roscoe Pepper and Richard Brake as Doom-Head steal every scene they are in, but Richard Brake is the most memorable as a cross between Rorschach from "Watchmen" and a much better version of The Joker than in any of the "Batman" movies.
The rest of the cast play mostly disposable characters who exist only to be killed off before you even have time to care about them. Everyone runs around stabbing, bashing, slicing, and wielding various weapons against each other in a very satisfying manner if only this movie had been made 10 years ago. The kills aren't very inventive, but they are competently executed. Pardon the mostly intentional pun.
Malcolm McDowell punctuates all the expected blood, gore, and violence like something out of Derek Jarman's "Jubilee" (1978), but there's not really enough of him to stand out like he often does. Shame. Fan favourites Meg Foster and E.G. Daily make up for this to some extent by adding more pathos to their performances and characters than the rest of the movie actually deserves.
Minor spoiler: Sheri Moon Zombie has lovely wrists, but the open ending is annoying.
Nicely shot, "31" isn't a bad movie, and it's certainly much better at storytelling than "The Lords of Salem" (2012), but Rob Zombie's best work still begins and ends with "The Devil's Rejects" (2005).
"Heidi, a radio DJ, is sent a box containing a record - a 'gift from the Lords'. The sounds within the grooves trigger flashbacks of her town's violent past. Is Heidi going mad, or are the Lords back to take revenge on Salem, Massachusetts?"
There's no point beating around the bush like a lot of reviewers do, "The Lords of Salem" is just a load of disappointing, boring, faux arty-farty bullshit.
As much as I like Rob Zombie's "Halloween II" and fancy his wife in everything she does, "The Lords of Salem" put the kibosh on any of those warm fuzzies. If a film like this, which borrows from everywhere yet still fails to deliver its story in a comprehensible manner, is the way that Rob Zombie has chosen to go, horror isn't just dead, it's rotting too.
There's a lot of pretentious arty-farty crap in the world, and then there's crap which pretends to be pretentious and arty-farty like this. Rob Zombie has described his film as "If Ken Russell directed The Shining", but that's nothing to be proud of. The obvious homages with pacing as lethargic as "2001: A Space Odyssey" are, however, the least of this movie's problems.
As I mentioned, I think a lot of Sheri Moon Zombie. She seems like a nice enough woman in real life and she's undeniably hot. The problem is that she doesn't have enough charisma on screen to pull off a lead role. This, of course, is disastrous in "The Lords of Salem" where the focus is on her.
Men seldom make passes at girls who need a good wash.
Sheri has great legs and a pretty face. You can say what you like about her bottom and washboard chest, and beauty is subjective, but you still can't deny her legs. You get to see a lot of them here too. Unfortunately, with ugly librarian glasses, dirty-looking dreadlocks and a bunch of fake tattoos, she's been made to look like a female version of her husband which doesn't exactly make her Heidi character sympathetic.
To say that the ex-junkie Heidi looks like she smells of wet dog and needs several showers (not to mention lots of laser tattoo removal to get rid of all that vile self-harming) is an understatement. Gratuitously showing her ass cheeks a couple of times doesn't help in any way, shape or form either. She's just too alienating. When Heidi says that she's "super tired" around 20 minutes in, that's the end as far as dialogue goes too. The correct word is "very" or "really" not "super"! I hope this is just a one-off and that irritating West Coast half-grammar hasn't spread from YouTube to real movies.
It's not really worth mentioning any of the other actors or actresses in "The Lords of Salem" especially as the big name convention whores who everyone expected to see cameos from are only in "blink and you'll miss it" moments, and the others are just in the background, but I'm obliged to say something merely to be sociable. I think Jeff Daniel Phillips is supposed to be channelling Rob Zombie, and Bruce Davison (aka Willard) has an even more pointless role than Scatman Crothers in "The Shining".
When old Willard uses Google (relabelled "Lookup") on his Apple product placement laptop to search Heidi's real name, the Bumhole (I mean Blumhouse) Productions influence is painfully obvious. Seriously, he'd just been reading the diary by the leader of the Lords of Salem and got his wife to play a bar of music out of it, so how is finding out that Heidi's real surname is Hawthorne (or "Hawthroen" according to the misspelled website) some great surprise? The Family Tree search is a most unnecessary discovery contrivance since there can't be that many people named Hawthorne who are born in Salem. It's not like her surname is Smith!!!
Sorry, you're not coming in if you don't have any little cakes!
I'm sure that there will be Rob Zombie fanboys raving about the three old satchel-asses, i.e. Macbeth witches, so I might as well say something about them too. Yes, Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace and Judy Geeson are the best part of the movie, but they deserved to have a movie devoted entirely to themselves without all the other rubbish going on. "The Witches of Eastwick" has already been made, but if anyone wanted to remake it as a real horror movie, I now know three actresses who would be good in it. As someone who usually can't stand Dee Wallace's acting, I'm still willing to give a compliment when I feel that she has actually earned it.
Giving it more benefit than it actually deserves, "The Lords of Salem" is really only "Rosemary's Baby" mixed with "Black Sunday", "The Shining", Lars Von Trier's "The Kingdom", "The Devils", "Crowhaven Farm", "The Ninth Gate", "Trick or Treat", "The Ring", "Pontypool", "The House of the Devil", and "Suckspiria". I could quite easily tick off another 20 or so movies (and short stories such as M.R. James' "Number 13") which it borrows from, but if I can do it, so can you.
There are so many places where parts of the story are set up just to fizzle out and be forgotten about that it's all a confusing mess which seems designed to be weird for the sake of being weird. Even Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears" is better than this shit and doesn't have anyone giving birth to a lobster in it. Oh, did I just ruin the ending? Too bad. Most people will either walk out or fall asleep before they get that far anyway. "The Lords of Salem" doesn't even have any spring-loaded cat scares in it!
Ultimately, the sad thing is that no matter how many bad reviews "The Lords of Salem" gets, the braindead "yukyukyuk" crowd will still pay to see it just to find out how bad it really is for themselves. Ker-ching! Once you're famous, it's a licence to make money from morons even if your product sucks possessed priests.
This, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.
"Laurie Strode struggles to come to terms with her brother Michael's deadly return to Haddonfield, Illinois; meanwhile, Michael prepares for another reunion with his sister."
I started writing this post at 5 o'clock in the morning while I was still trying to process what I saw when I watched Rob Zombie's "Halloween II" for the first time last night. After another nap, I've even slept on it twice now, turning it over in my mind as I drifted off to sleep, and, now that I'm fully awake again, I still can't get past the fact that I really enjoyed it.
The thing is, I really hated Rob Zombie's "re-imagining" of "Halloween" (2007). I'm not even joking when I say that I use the DVD for a coaster. It keeps my cold Monster energy drinks from ruining the surface of my computer desk, and that's a far better use for that movie than any pleasure which I got from watching it.
I'm no dummy and I realise that Rob Zombie seemed to go back on his word many times over the years about hating remakes or having anything to do with ever making one. I even know that he claimed to not want any part of directing a sequel until, of course, somebody made him a financial offer which he couldn't refuse. I can't blame him for it. To be honest, if somebody offered me millions of dollars (or just one million for that matter), I'd turn heel and throw all my integrity out of the window for a comfortable lifestyle too. There's not one of us who wouldn't do the same thing, so let's not be hypocrites, okay?
Contrary to what all the major critics and ranters on YouTube would have you believe, "Halloween II" isn't actually a bad horror movie at all. Give or take a few flaws, it's also far from being the worst of either the old franchise or the rebooted one. Not that I need to defend Rob Zombie's decisions, but let me just address some of the criticism in an attempt to show you what I liked about the film.
The biggest problem for most people was that Michael Myers (AKA "The Shape") as played by Tyler Mane, didn't look or behave much like the old version, but why should he? The original 'Halloween" series was supposed to be made up of different stories, hence the existence of "Halloween III: Season of the Witch", and it was only because the fans demanded it that the idea was abandoned in favour of more Michael Myers and all the continuity errors which followed. None of the versions of Michael Myers are exactly the same, and silliness abounded with his supposed supernatural strength right from John Carpenter's "Halloween" in 1978. The people who are still that hung up on the look of the mask, Michael's physique, or his mannerisms, simply weren't paying enough attention to the other movies.
I saw nothing wrong with the new version of Michael Myers at all other than the continuity being lost a little bit by replacing the younger version with a different actor, namely Chase Vanek instead of Daeg Faerch. As for the adult Michael looking like a mixture between a bum and a wrestler with a beard like Rob Zombie's, does it really matter? All anyone wants from Michael Myers is to see him kill everybody in his path in the most brutal manner possible, and he certainly did that.
If, like me, you've watched the "Unrated Director's Cut" of "Halloween II", a major problem seems to be that the adult Michael speaks one word at the end. It's a bit odd but not something which couldn't be explained. After all, he could speak before and during his time in the asylum. He just chose not to.
Yet more haters really disliked the "White Horse" motif, its psychological implications, and the fact that a physical white horse appeared along with the deceased Deborah Myers and the young version of Michael Myers. It wasn't supposed to be supernatural but a glimpse inside Michael's mind. Most people didn't get it.
Some people just don't like Sheri Moon Zombie anyway and hate the nepotism whereby she gets cast in all of her husband's movies. Again, why shouldn't Rob Zombie do exactly what he wants? He's the director and if he wanted to throw a giant bunny into the middle of the film for no reason whatsoever, that would be his decision. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if it was just random, but the "White Horse" motif and the ghostly-looking Deborah Myers were supposed to be a link to another aspect of the story which, if you have a brain which hasn't been addled by watching no-budget backyard epics, you start to realise a long time before the end.
I will also defend Sheri Moon Zombie for a number of reasons. Not only is she absolutely gorgeous, but she's a damned good actress. Maybe she doesn't get as much opportunity to show her range in the "Halloween" movies, but people seem to forget how great she was in "The Devil's Rejects" (2005) as Baby. I don't even like the film that much, but I liked her in it. I'll put it bluntly, I probably wouldn't have watched any of Rob Zombies films if Sheri Moon Zombie hadn't been in them. Would I have watched "Halloween" or "Halloween II" for the dubious charms of Scout Taylor-Compton or Danielle Harris? I think not.
The stupidest comments I've heard or read online about "Halloween II" have all centred on Scout Taylor-Compton's performance as not being the same as Jamie Lee Curtis'. While she might not be the best actress in the world nor was Jamie Lee Curtis either. Do people not realise that there's a script involved in movies which might not bring the best out of an actor or actress? As much as I like the original version of "Halloween", Jamie Lee Curtis was as wooden as she could be in it and didn't exactly light up the screen with her presence. Laurie Strode was never a very interesting character anyway.
In the original version of "Halloween II" (1981), not that this was a remake in much more than name and the initial setting, Laurie Strode was far more unrealistic. Call me cynical, but the only reason anyone even cares about that film is because of Pamela Susan Shoop's boobs in the hot tub scene.
Scout Taylor-Compton gave a very realistic performance as Laurie Strode considering what her character had been through. If you had been stabbed, disfigured, seen your friends get killed or hacked about in front of you, would you not become unstable too? The whole premise that she was low-class (for lack of a better term) to begin with, and didn't have the greatest coping mechanisms, just made her more real to me. The more unrealistic character was actually Danielle Harris' version of Annie Brackett who seemed to be either in complete denial or far too confident for her own good. Why she gets defended by "Halloween" fanboys just because she was in the earlier "Halloween" movies is a mystery to me since her acting ability is also minimal.
The "white trash" aesthetic of Rob Zombie's movies gets a lot of flak for no good reason too. Since I've been living in America and encountered so many people like that, I can say that these characters are representative of the norm rather than an exception. Unlike the middle-class comedy movies which the more political part of the Hollywood machine throws at the rest of the world to encourage the myth that America is so great, the uneducated, constantly swearing, drunken "white trash" of Rob Zombie's movies are the reality. Maybe they aren't all as psychotic, but even that is debatable from my own experience.
I'll get off my soapbox just as quickly as I got on it to say something about the "Dr. Samuel Loomis" character as played by Malcolm McDowell. I thought he was great as the "prima donna" which everyone who gets a little bit of fame is likely to become. He even worked to some extent as comic relief between some of the most savage kills I've ever seen in a horror movie. The only valid criticism which I will uphold about "Halloween II", was that Loomis didn't contribute a lot to the plot other than revealing a secret in his book which Laurie Strode wasn't prepared for. I never thought Donald Pleasence was all that great in the role so Malcolm McDowell was a decent upgrade.
Since this review has turned out to be a lot longer than I wanted it to be, I'll just wrap it up by saying that I now consider "Halloween II" to be one of the greatest modern horror movies of the last decade. The gore is outstanding, the tension maybe not so much, and, as usual, there are no scares, but, as much as I wanted to hate all the characters, I ended up caring about them to some extent. The characters were interesting to me rather than likeable, and that set 'Halloween II" apart from nearly all of the more contrived horror movies which I've endured so far this year.
If you were also deterred by Rob Zombie's first "Halloween" movie, the haters, rumour mongers, and message board arguments, you might want to watch (or rewatch) "Halloween II" yourself now that it's had a few years since its release. I'm going to surprise you all by putting "Halloween II" in "The Vault". For $5 from Wal-mart's bargain bin, it was a nice surprise, and I highly recommend it.
Another absolutely awful remake which will be in the DVD bargain bins in three month's time or for sale with Rob Zombie's previous crappy horror films just to get rid of them.
Not as bad as some of the sequels to the original Halloween, and Sheri Moon can actually act a bit in this one, but it was obviously more than Rob Zombie could handle.
The dialogue and script was appalling. It should have been two separate films and even then both would have sucked. The "prequel" was just overlong and boring.
The "remake" part, on the other hand, was rushed and lacked atmosphere, characterisation, acting ability and, more suprisingly, imaginative gore. I expected it to be far nastier. Effects were only average and the camerawork was very amateur throughout.
Michael Myers has been totally emasculated as the boogeyman now and this film has killed the "Halloween" franchise completely. The only scary thing was that it took 17 million dollars to make this rubbish.
Nobody can replace Donald Pleasence as Dr Loomis either. Malcolm McDowell was just on the wrong side of laughable with some of the worst lines in horror movie history. Well, at least we won't see him again.
Just stick to the original John Carpenter version.
