Welcome back to Jack Recommends Underrated Modern Horror! If you haven’t checked out the first part to this collection, then go ahead, do that real quick and then come back here. Now get ready to enter the house built on sin, as it’s time to review the cult classic, beloved and reviled by many, House of 1000 Corpses.
I’m going to be completely honest with y’all, this one is just stupid, screwed-up fun, and it deserves a lot more credit than it gets. 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses was the directorial debut of Robert Bartleh Cummings or, as he is now legally known as, Rob Zombie. No really, he actually changed his last name to Zombie, probably because he’d get eaten alive in the heavy metal world with his previous name. This film actually started out as a concept for a haunted maze for Universal Studios Hollywood, but the idea grew so big that it eventually became a whole feature film.
House involves a quartet of young people (Rainn Wilson, Chris Hardwick, Erin Daniels, and Jennifer Jostyn) in the year 1977 on a road trip to investigate several offbeat and macabre attractions across America (think “Mystery Inc.,” but if there was no smart one). The gang gets lucky as they find Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen, owned by, who else, Captain Spaulding (played by the late great Sid Haig), a balding, crusting, creepy old guy dressed like the lovechild of Jack Nicholson’s Joker and a melting wax figure of Uncle Sam.
Spaulding sends them on a dangerous search for the tree that the legendary mad scientist only known as Dr. Satan was hanged from. They don’t find the tree, but instead find a kooky Texas chick named Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), who, after their car’s tires “mysteriously” blow out, invites the group to meet her strange family, the Fireflys, who are essentially just the Mansons if they got an 80s sitcom. We meet Baby’s stick-thin adopted brother, Otis (Bill Moseley), her Andre the Giant-sized half brother, Tiny (Matthew McGrory), her mother, Gloria (Karen Black), who looks like a hillbilly Jennifer Coolige, and finally, Grandpa Hugo (Dennis Fimple), who’s just kinda there.
I’m not going to spoil the rest of the film, but I will say if you ever wondered about the existence of skunk apes and what Dwight Shrute would look like as a Fiji Mermaid, this is the movie for you.
It’s no secret that this film is a hundred percent not for everyone. It’s dirty, it’s grotesque, it’s gory, it can be downright uncomfortable at times. But that shouldn’t scare anyone away from watching it. Horror movies often get the most success when they make an effort to do something that defies the mainstream — either to make people think, to make people squirm in their seats, or to make people throw up (yeah, that happens sometimes). Every actor in this film (particularly Haig and Moon Zombie) is giving every fiber of their being into their roles, even they know this is stupid bloody fun and they probably had a lot of stupid bloody fun on set. House, in production, sets, costumes, scope and scale, feels like an indie movie, a music video, and an intense hangover all at once, the true definition of modern cult cinema.
Spooky Score: 4 / 5
Stay tuned for Chapter 3, this time, in the flesh…er, print!
