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Movie Review: The Lords of Salem (2013)
Not So Mighty

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Zombos Says: Typical Rob Zombie Fare

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The Lords of Salem is a visually complex fever dream (or confused one; I can argue for both) from director Rob Zombie. We know how it will end. We already know how all his movies will end. Zombie's blind spot is being unable to fool us through tension and suspense. Each movie becomes an exercise in the downward descent, the great fall, the whac a mole hit squarely every time. This, of course, kills any hope of seeing anything more than a mono story done in stereo colors.

But what colors!

I do love his use of older black and white movie clips, too. And then there are those large Andy Warhol style black and white pop art prints in various rooms of Heidi's (Sheri Moon Zombie) apartment. He even manages to include a print of Commando Cody, who bleeds profusely on the bathroom wall as Heidi withers away. The movie clips Zombie uses will be familiar to genre fans, but his enthusiastic deployment of them, in-between his deliberately overbearing religious and sexual imagery, errupts everything into a Pop Rocks experience: it loses its novelty and significance with continued use.

With Rob Zombie there's only one ending to all his movies—I mentioned that—but how he gets there is also a familiar trip with familiar characters. The Lords of Salem has a lot of scenery to look at while we make the trip. He takes us through the neighborhoods of pre-1980 Times Square porno, with all the subtlety of a black velvet clown with neon color highlights, and stops to hammer us with cackling old crones reveling giddily in their evil, stepping out of their ancient woodcuts to overboil this pot of nihilistic stew as they spit and gloat and reek of foulness. I can't tell if he's going for femjoy dominance and parody or deep down he secretly fears castration so his witches are really what he thinks of women.

Those crones toil well beyond Shakespeare’s boil and bubble in their roles of the Devil’s desciples. Meg Foster is stunningly unrecognizable as the decrepit and saggy high priestess, Margaret Morgan. After being burned alive and hankering for revenge, she takes aim at the female descendents of the puritans that baked her and her covenors to a crisp.

The bizarre music the witches play winds up on vinyl and is mysteriously delivered to the radio station Heidi and her fellow DJs (Ken Foree and Jeff Daniel Phillips) burn the midnight oil at. The music casts its spell and we watch its effect on Heidi.

And watch.

And watch.

And the one possible tense string brought into play by Bruce Davison’s Matthias, an author who is slowly realizing the witches he declares extinct are actually quite alive and currently in the process of serving him tea, is plucked only once, then abruptly stopped; a wasted note that would have truly surprised me if Zombie stepped out of his limitations and played it for all it was worth.

And we continue to watch.

And watch some more as Heidi misses her radio broadcasts, ignores her friends, forgets to walk the dog, and drags her tiny butt in and out of the nightmares Zombie stitches together for visual impact more than emotional context. Providing intertitles to let us know what day of the week it is, time isn't really important. Everything blurs to an ending that reaches further in its reckless abandon than any of Zombies previous films. I applaud the attempt while lamenting the near-sighted vision.

Whether you view all this as an LSD trip or a redux-psychedelia tab pressed from oils of Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria,and 1970s trash-art esthetic,or you just want to take Zombie as film auteur reaching out to the rows in back of the theater, his continuing metal-crashing against white-thrashing Christian dogma and precepts is the same bellicose vein throbbing excess seen through each of his films.

After all his movies share the same bleak monotone, you start to feel Rob Zombie hates himself, hates the stain-free life, hates the bad to the bone life, and hates having to make sense of any of it for us, or himself.

And especially hates us for having to pass judgement on it or daring to derive entertainment from it.

That’s refreshing. I admire his zeal even if I think he’s thick as a brick in his approach to horror.

Zombie’s Halloween II (2009)

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Michael myers Zombos Says: Very Good

I did not expect Rob Zombie to surprise me with Halloween II. Beyond his unavoidably repetitious metal-rockers, hippie-hillbillies, and tattoo-punkstering of Laurie Strode and Haddonfield Illinois’ social set, miring Halloween II in a seedy glaze of grunge, strip joints, and Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa posters, he surprised me.

Probably many horror fans are surprised, too, and will be dismayed or downright violently annoyed with this bold mashing of J-horror’s quintessential rage-filled imagery into Myers’ endless angst-driven slashing ouevre.

In this brilliantly audacious diversion from John Carpenter’s classic bogeyman, Michael Myers (the towering Tyler Mane) becomes a deadly juggernaut guided by a mysterious other embodied in the white gossamer spectre of his dead mother and her majestic white stallion. But to what purpose? Is she a vision of Shiva the Destroyer? Or is she a demonic chaos seeking succor? Or is she simply a confabulation in Myers’ tortured mind? Zombie builds mystery by confounding us with this and an unexpected folly a deux between Myers and his sister, which now takes the Halloween franchise into a strikingly new direction.

My surprise comes from how Zombie’s bizarre imagery grates against my expectations (and probably those of most of the audience): a mad-hatter’s kind of tea party in Hell; Myers’ adult skeleton–its skull wearing his scarecrow-like mask–eerily hanging in the background as young Michael and spectral mommy chat about the future of the Myers family; and then the final jarring image that completely displaces Halloween II from its slasher underpinning by invoking the psychologically terrifying hallmarks of Samara from The Ring and The Grudge’s unstoppable curse of violence. I am more than surprised: I did not think Rob Zombie capable of such creative impudence.

Halloween II 2009Teasing with a beginning that makes us believe he is comfortably rehashing the hospital mayhem from 1981’s Halloween II, Zombie instead drops us off in Haddonfield a year later. Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) now lives with long-haired–and burned-out–Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his short-haired, more healthy-eating, daughter Annie (Danielle Harris). Laurie suffers from horrific nightmares and attends therapy sessions. She is a wreck physically and mentally, and cannot get her life–after that night Michael came home–jump-started again. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is doing smashingly well. He is promoting his succcessful book on Myers. Zombie alternates between showing Laurie’s ongoing struggle with her trauma and Loomis’ unsympathetic attitude to the fallout from Myers’ serial-killing as he tours the book-signing circuit. More and more, the limelight reveals Loomis’ callousness in contrast to Laurie’s growing despair when she cannot find forgetfulness in the shadows.

There is no suspense generated from this shifting focus between Laurie, Loomis, and Myers’ continuing killing spree, even after Zombie gives Myers a shiny new knife, one Jim Bowie would be proud of, and sends him off, guided by his visions, to bring Laurie home. I wondered how all this carnage leading up to another Halloween night with Michael Myers could leave no room for suspense. I will pin it on Zombie paying greater attention to his imagery, which is wonderfully macabre and wicked and filled with malevolent long-haired spectres (although in a Zombie movie just about everyone has long hair), to the detriment of his more perfunctory treatment of Myers. He is big, he is bad, he is unstoppable; yes, we get that. Having Myers kill and eat a dog, uncooked, also seems a gratuitous gorehound moment, which Zombie seems to relish. Missing from this Halloween movie is the signiture music, which only comes into play at the end for the revelation that, ironically, changes everything. Carpenter’s music would have been out of place here anyway. This is no longer Carpenter’s classic vision: it is Zombie’s.

There is a sad flashback involving young Michael at the sanitarium. Michael wants to know when he can go home, while we know he can never go home; making him a lost soul who will stay lost. The gift of a toy white horse figures prominently in adult Michael’s visions. But the ultimate meaning and significance of those visions will have to wait until Halloween III.

Which leads me to another surprise: I never thought I would be eager to see a new Rob Zombie movie. If he directs Halloween III, I will be. Hopefully he can put the suspense back into the next one.