From
the moment one first claps eyes on Captain Spaulding, one has the feeling that
this isn’t going to be your standard slasher movie. Oh, sure, it’s got most of the classic
slasher themes in it – the house in the middle of nowhere; the fatal curiosity
in a dark local folk legend that proves to be all too real; the psycho in the
back seat of the car. But there’s more
and still more, the movie revealing Rob Zombie’s arresting if somewhat grim
vision a little at a time. Just when you
think you’ve peeled off one layer of traditional slasher horror, a new layer
presents itself, as horrific as the last but weirder, until one arrives
at the final horror, the Borg-like, Cenobite-like, and totally whacked out
Doctor Satan himself. It’s kind of like Friday the 13th, only there’s more Jasons, they show up
sooner in the movie, and they’re a lot more interesting.
So what’s the
plot? The movie starts with Captain
Spaulding squaring off with a couple of inept armed robbers. There’s the first layer of horror: rural fruitcakes in the manner of Deliverance.
But then four kids stop in
at Cap’n Spaulding’s joint and take the dime tour. They hear about the legend of Doctor Satan,
who performed unauthorized brain surgery on inmates at the mental hospital. Seems Dr. Satan M.D. was hanged by the
locals, only his body was never found and the folk legend is that he’s out
there running around doing horrible misdeeds.
The kids (some of them) decide to find out and end up having dinner with
a houseful of more or less totally insane people. Okay, fair enough, there’s the second layer
of horror: psychopaths in the grand
tradition of The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The kids are now, in Captain Spaulding’s words, fucked. But in the scheme of things, there is screwed and then there is royally screwed. Two
are just screwed, but two are royally screwed, in that they graduate to the
third layer of horror, Doctor Satan himself, who struck me as part Borg, part
Cenobite, and part something else altogether.
The scene of Jerry buying the farm beneath Doctor Satan’s brain surgery
made my toes curl.
But the plot of the
movie isn’t really the point of the movie.
The plot is really not all that different from a thousand other slasher
movies; it’s what Rob Zombie does with the standard fare that makes this movie
unusual. I’d like to explore some of the
things Rob did.
1. It’s not all that gory. There are scenes of gore, but in general, the
movie’s not a bloodbath, certainly nothing approaching Peter Jackson’s Dead-Alive.
High-intensity gore serves
as the staple in horror movies because it saves the director from having to
create truly horrific visions. “Just
throw a bunch of blood and guts around and it’ll be okay” is the horror-movie
mantra. But Zombie was discreet with the
gore. There’s blood, to be sure, and
stabbing, and lots of other stuff, but really not all that much. What the film did have, however, was
something approaching true horror. The
movie didn’t scare me, but it horrified me.
They’re different things.
2. The characters aren’t as stereotypical as
they seem. Captain Spaulding, for
example, was immense fun to watch. He’s
as coarse as burlap underwear, but I loved watching him. I replayed the top menu on the DVD over and
over just to hear him say “We-e-e-lll,
shit the bed!” Spaulding (and many of the other characters)
curse like longshoreman, but it’s not just cursing. Zombie has a good ear for cursing and in the
hands of Captain Spaulding, cursing turned into something approaching an art
form. Baby was another very interesting
character, a nightmarish combination of eroticism and evil. In most slasher movies, the femme fatales are dark, icy, cool and almost detached and unemotional, but Baby is
anything but. She loves what she does
(chiefly, stab people) and Zombie allows the character to enjoy it fully. The
scene of her licking the knife after she stabs what’s-her-name was a great
touch; the notion of total surrender to whim and impulse, and the delight in
that surrender, was extremely well done.
Then there’s Karen Black as the dissipated mature strumpet, but that’s
not all she is. And you start to think
that the Edgar Winter wannabe is the chief bad guy, and you realize he’s far
from being the chief bad guy; he’s just a fruitcake who did too much LSD and
blabbers Dennis Hopper-like absurdities while the real horror goes on
elsewhere.
3. The inclusion of stray, seemingly extraneous
bits of video gave the movie a weird, staccato, hallucination-like
quality. And yes, I have hallucinated,
and I know what it’s like. My
hallucinations were brought on chiefly by intense chemotherapy, and I suffered
a vivid and fairly long-lasting series of disconnected images and moods
(including, among other things, the chilling notion that my skin had come loose
and would fall off if I moved). In the
movie, the snippets of TV, the “Our Next Feature” bit, all of the odd,
seemingly irrelevant bits of film gave the movie the same disquieting
feel. This can be overdone. I’ve seen movies so awash in extraneous film
they were essentially nothing but extraneous film, but I thought Zombie hit
just the right balance.
So what do we make of
this movie? I have no idea, I
confess. I can’t really say it was good, because good implies a lot of things. It implies that the good guys win, that
Godliness prevails, that evil is defeated, that the innocent are spared. Well, let’s see. The good guys didn’t win. Godliness didn’t prevail. Evil won in a big way. And the innocent were bled and slaughtered
like farm animals. So in conventional
terms, it’s not a good movie.
But it’s a cool movie nevertheless. It’s nightmarish, disturbing, at times even
shocking, and always idiosyncratic and full of unexpected little touches and
oddly turned phrases that stick with one (“I don’t like chicken, and I hate
clowns!” comes to mind, as does the memorable “Well, it is now official, you
have wasted most of my goddamned day.”)
There are scarier
movies out there. Alien struck me as particularly frightening, at least before Aliens revised the aliens into just bugs.
And there are gorier movies out there.
But I’ve only seen one other movie that rivaled this movie’s ability to
create a sense of grim horror, and that was the heroically unwatchable King of the Dead, a German movie that was about 40% autopsy
film and included what is perhaps the most horrendous thing I’ve ever seen in a
movie. I won't even write about it -
suffice it to say that as River Phoenix says in 8mm, there are some things
you just can’t un-see.
So. Good writing, eerie and arresting scenes,
excellent characters (especially the Bad Folk) are on the good side. What’s on the bad side? Well, I didn’t like the kids very much. Maybe that’s good, since none of them
survived. Other than that, I’d say the
movie did pretty much what it set out to do.
But I do have one
complaint. I think there was way more than a
thousand corpses around the house.
3 Skulls
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