I caught a special screening of Rob Zombie’s new movie 3 From Hell last night, special in the sense that it is only playing in theaters for three nights and it was the uncut, NC-17 version of the film. If you want to see it and haven’t done so already, you will have to wait until it’s released on DVD/VOD/whatever in October. Whether or not you give a shit will largely depend on if you liked The Devil’s Rejects. This is the third part of a trilogy with House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects and it is almost a carbon copy of The Devil’s Rejects. Truthfully, The Devil’s Rejects is probably Zombie’s best film, but that’s like me saying that I’m the best-looking guy in a comic book store; it may be true, but it’s not necessarily worth bragging about. I think that The Devil’s Rejects is an okay movie and this is a shittier version of it. I guess that puts this on the shittier side of okay.
You might recall that The Devil’s Rejects ended with Captain Spaulding, Otis and Baby being very clearly killed in a hail of bullets. Turns out they were fine and recovered quite nicely from about 20 bullet wounds apiece. They went to jail and their half-brother Foxy finally turns up after 10 years to break them out. Once freed, they head out on the road for more random killing and inane banter. Sadly, Captain Spaulding only has a brief cameo in the beginning of the film because actor Sid Haig has been suffering from serious health issues. The script was rewritten with the new character (Foxy) taking over what would have been Spaulding’s role. Considering that Spaulding has been the most iconic and entertaining part of this series, that is a major bummer.
With a 14-year gap between films and the clear death of these characters at the end of the last movie, I figured that Zombie must have had a really special idea to bother making this movie. I was wrong. This is from the Hangover 2 school of sequel writing, where simply changing some proper nouns is meant to disguise the fact that it’s the same fucking movie. After the incredibly half-assed explanation for how they are still alive, the movie is basically a remake of The Devil’s Rejects. They escape the cops, find a group of people to torture for an extended period, seek refuge in a brothel and are hunted down by the relative of one of their victims. It’s the exact same fucking story. If Zombie did much more than take the script for Rejects and make edits with track changes, then he wasted his time. Why he felt compelled to bring these characters back after all this time and then do so little with them is beyond me.
I really want to like Rob Zombie’s movies more than I do. I like his music (especially with White Zombie), I’ve seen him in concert several times and he does know a lot about movies. I would love to sit down and have a beer or twenty with the guy. Given that, I want to give him a compliment. I get what he is trying to do here and he gets the aesthetics right. This isn’t really a horror movie, but it is a tribute to the exploitation films of the 70s (especially biker movies, women in prison movies and spaghetti westerns). And it looks the part. I think that this was shot digitally, but it has the grimy look of something that would have played on 42nd Street in the 70s. From the coloring to the cinematography to the costume designs, this feels like a 70s exploitation movie. I love that scene, so this appeals to me, at least theoretically.
The problem is that Zombie is fucking terrible at writing characters and dialogue. There is not a single appealing character in this film. Much like in all of Zombie’s films, every character is just a stereotype of the worst white trash garbage. I get that Zombie is trying to present these people as anti-heroes, but the writing isn’t strong enough to pull it off and we are never given a reason to like any of these people. From Dusk till Dawn is a good comparison for how to do this shit right. The two leads in that movie are despicable murderers and rapists, but the goddamn thing is so well-written and the performances are so strong that you end up rooting for them anyway. These movies attempt something similar, but it doesn’t work because the characters are so one-dimensional that they are never appealing. It is supposed to make the movie more disturbing, but it just ends up being boring because you have nobody to root for. The dialogue sure as fuck doesn’t help either. The big home invasion scene is trying to do something akin to the infamous home invasion in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but it loses impact when the characters are all speaking like a group of ten-year-old boys that just discovered porn for the first time.
This just doesn’t work for me. If you really liked The Devil’s Rejects, then you will probably get some enjoyment out of this if you can get beyond the lack of Captain Spaulding. If you didn’t like The Devil’s Rejects, then stay the fuck away from this. I hope in the future Rob Zombie will start simply coming up with ideas and then hand them over to better screenwriters because I am getting really tired of this redneck bullshit schtick.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_from_Hell#/media/File:3-from-hell-poster.jpeg
