Love ‘im or hate ‘im, Rob Zombie is back for more in the latest installment of groady, gruesome, grindhouse gore....
★ out of ★★★★★
If you went to Sunset Strip and asked a hip-looking millennial what elements exemplified the grindhouse cinema era, what do you think the response would be? Confused? Indifferent? Bored? Titillated? Or do you think they’d start to rattle off a listed of oft-used Rob Zombie tropes and tripe?
Roger Corman, James Wan, George Romero, Alfred Hitchcock, Dario Argento, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Tobe Hooper, Jennifer Kent, Mario Bava,...
★★ out of ★★★★★ At Rob Zombie’s darkened dirtbag core is a full and unfiltered embrace of the age-old adage “if it ain’t broke, don't fix it.” Slow motion. Hyperbolic acting (or in some cases no acting). Closeups so close you can count individual pores Captain Spaulding’s grease-paint soaked forehead. Weirdly rare and off-putting selection of non-Joe Walsh James Gang tracks. If you’ve seen House of a Thousand Corpses and Devil’s Rejects then you’ve been thoroughly exposed to Mr. Zombie’s cinema trickery.
★.5 out of ★★★★★
Anthology horror films are so full of creepy goodness! Moral tales. Freaky through lines. Peculiar and off-putting horror hosts and narrators. They give us everything we desire in spooky bite-sized chunks. Until they don’t.
Captain Spaulding is gone at the age of 80. The big man with a big personality had a fifty-year career in the genre and made a big impact.