Here's our roundup of the best new series of the year so far, and where to watch them.
Related lists from IMDb users
Title: House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.
| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
 |
Chad Bannon | ... | Killer Karl |
| William Bassett | ... | Sheriff Frank Huston (as William H. Bassett) | |
| Karen Black | ... | Mother Firefly | |
| Erin Daniels | ... | Denise Willis | |
|
|
Joe Dobbs III | ... | Gerry Ober |
| Judith Drake | ... | Skunk Ape Wife | |
| Dennis Fimple | ... | Grampa Hugo | |
| Gregg Gibbs | ... | Dr. Wolfenstein | |
| Walton Goggins | ... | Steve Naish | |
| Sid Haig | ... | Captain Spaulding | |
| Chris Hardwick | ... | Jerry Goldsmith | |
|
|
Ken Johnson | ... | Skunk Ape Husband |
| Jennifer Jostyn | ... | Mary Knowles | |
| Irwin Keyes | ... | Ravelli | |
| Matthew McGrory | ... | Tiny Firefly | |
On the eve of Halloween, on October 1977, four friends--Bill, Jerry, Mary, and Denise--embark on an exciting cross-country road trip to write a guidebook about offbeat roadside attractions in America's less-travelled roads. Before long, the young explorers chance upon Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen, only to become infatuated with the local legend of a deranged serial-killer doctor, and cross paths with the mysterious hitchhiker, Baby. However, when the unsuspecting group meets Baby's eccentric family after having a flat tyre, an endless night of terror, torture, and murder ensues. Has anyone ever got out alive from the House of Thousand Corpses? Written by Nick Riganas
In my opinion, House of 1000 Corpses is a fan movie. Fans of both the horror genre and Rob Zombie are likely to love it. Though I do not count myself a fan of either, I do like both at times, and I am quite familiar with both. Those familiar with Rob Zombie are likely to be the only ones who completely 'get' this clever little film - appreciating its depraved sense of humor and nihilism. Zombie's themes are fairly consistent - evil (without the usual religious connotations and clichés), murder, sex, insanity, and stereotype "hillbillies". Zombie's world is not a place for people who are terribly concerned with reality, but, for Zombie himself, it seems to supply endless muse for a prolific and interesting commercial creativity.
Two couples traveling across country and working on a book on bizarre roadside attractions stumble across a filling station / theme park run by a vaguely evil clown with a bad attitude - Captain Spaulding. Spaulding teaches them of a few local legends, including a mad surgeon who worked in a local insane asylum and came to be known as Dr. Satan for the grotesque surgical procedures he applied to mental patients in secret. They pick up a pretty blonde hitch-hiker on their way to see the tree where Dr Satan was hung, and run into some car problems, so the hitch-hiker invites them to her family house. The family, apparently headed by the phenomenally weird Karen Black, makes The Addams family look like the Brady Bunch.
My narrative has described the first 20 minutes or so of the film, and at this point the film, much like RZ's songs, is so campy that it seems a straightforward horror comedy. However, once our protagonists are in "the house", the plot takes a decidedly more sinister spin, and never lets up from that point forward.
This film successfully and entertainingly portrays all of RZ's themes in about the same proportions as his music. Of them all, sex is the least explored, and I, for one, am thankful for that. The film also walks a delicate line between Hannibal Lector grotesque art realism and supernatural forces. For example, at one point, one of the bad guys turns on a cassette player with low batteries so that the voice recorded on it sounds extra-satanic.
If you have problems with blood and other bodily fluids, and utterly repulsive surgically induced variations on the human body, you might want to avoid this film. If you don't have any great objections to standard hardcore horror imagery, or if you like it, you might want to see this. It is masterfully visualized and does a much better job of making horror into art than the standard Hollywood horror fair. This is Rob Zombie's art, and he does it much better than most. This first major effort in film bodes well for his future use of the medium, and I will look forward to his next.