The Lords of Salem

Alright, so watched this last night but finished it too late to right a review. Here it is...

10/16: For tonight's film I watched Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem. Allow me to preface this by saying I am not a fan of Rob Zombie's films. It was years ago that I saw House of 1000 Corpses so maybe it's worth a revisit, but at the time I thoroughly hated the movie. A torture porn to the highest degree and a not very well made one at that, it was a pretty bad start to Zombie's filmmaking career. I didn't see Devil's Rejects mostly based on my hatred for House, but I did see his Halloween remake and thought it was pretty middling. So with all those opinions I tried to go into Lords with an open mind and was actually excited for it as I've heard good things from a lot of people.

And once again, I had my Zombie opinions further cemented. While Lords has some strong imagery (the cinematography is by and large well done) and some good atmosphere for a lot of the movie what I was left with was a bunch of disconnected horror images that had nothing tying them together. I think what Zombie attempted to do with this movie was make a slow burner with a trippy edge much like, say, The Shining. There are many creepy, bizarre scenes that look (mostly) good but have nothing concrete to ground them. What makes The Shining so successful is that with all the creepy images of elevators full of blood, dead old bathtub women, and creepy twins there are grounding images that aren't bizarre and clearly tell a story. Lords has far too few of these to connect all the disparate scenes to leave the viewer with anything to hold on to; instead I descended into boredom wondering when all the random would make any sort of sense--and by the end, even with a flimsy story acting as glue, it still felt like a waste. There's something about witches, an evil record, a demon baby, a cliche story of the main character being a descendent of a cursed bloodline, etc. It becomes simply frustrating and loses it's interest quickly. 

I applaud Zombie for going a different way with this movie than his past offerings but I think Lords simply shows further that he's not a great filmmaker. He has image but no ability to tell story or, for that matter, to pick good actors. Holy God, I know Sherri Moon is your wife but she is bad. Like, bad fucking bad. 

4/10