Rob Zombie gets a lot of crap for his movies. Seriously, people shit all over everything he does. It probably doesn't help that he remade a beloved horror classic like "Halloween" (which i really didn't think was as bad as people made it out to be) and his films definitely have a lot of cussing and nudity and gore and depravity and a whole lot of style over substance. I can see how it annoys people. Like that kid on the playground during recess who thought he was cool because he said the word "fuck" a lot. I've always liked Zombie's movies, though. With very few exceptions, they have a creeping sense of dread that gets under my skin, so I dig them. I hope I dig this one, too.
In this movie, Sheri Moon Zombie plays a radio DJ named Heidi who is plagued by nightmarish visions after she listens to an album by a group known as "The Lords." The record shows up mysteriously at her job one day, so she decides to take it home and give it a listen. This is a really bad idea, of course, but we only know that because this is a horror movie. It seems that having records appear at her job by bands that hope to get some airtime is not an unknown occurrence, so it makes sense that she'd listen to the record. As things start to get weird, then scary, then even more terrifying, Heidi has to figure out if she can defeat the ancient evil before it's too late.
This movie hearkens back to the Salem witch trials, but it takes the view that there were actual witches in Salem, who worshipped Satan and sacrificed children and danced naked around a fire, asking Satan to appear among them. I almost like this view better, because it's gratifying imagining some real witches getting bloody revenge for all the people who were tortured and killed in the name of ridding the world of evil. If their power survived even when their bodies were burned back then, they had to be powerful, and the haunting music on that record makes it easy to imagine some ancient evil seeping out through the music and infecting anyone who listens to it.
The more time goes by, the more Heidi is affected by the evil emanating from that record. She has weird dreams and visions that follow her around her apartment building, at work, and even when she seeks refuge in a church. I liked Heidi, so it's sad to see her break down like this. The setup of the movie is that it begins on Monday, continues on Tuesday, gets worse on Wednesday, even worse on Thursday, and so on. The title cards that appear onscreen show the progression of the movie throughout the week, and the oppressive terror gets worse as time goes on and we sense Heidi slipping away day by day.
Ok, so it probably helps that I literally JUST watched "All the Colors of the Dark" yesterday, but I get what this movie was trying to do. The parts of the movie that were linear, telling a scary story from beginning to end (woman finds record, listens to it, gets infected by evil that wants to use her to its own purposes) were good, and scary, and effective because I cared about Heidi and didn't want anything bad to happen to her. That's about half of the movie. The other half is this swirling mass of psychedelic visions, with strobe lights and blood and sexial depravity, and those are...hard to watch.
Partly because I get chronic migraines and these scenes about made my head explode, partly because they're confusing (they're supposed to be) and partly because they disyract from that other half of the movie, which I really like. I think a lot of the backlash against this movie is because of those mindful visions that gave everyone a headache and didn't make sense, and frankly just pissed people off. Am I saying that this movie is bad? Not really, I actually liked this movie, because I had context for what the nightmare visions were trying to do (if watching them onscreen was bad, imagine what it's like to have them in your head, playing over and over) but I get why people didn't like the movie, or didn't get it, or just wanted Rob Zombie to calm the fuck down and make a NORMAL movie for once, because I think he does a good job at that, if he gives himself the chance. I like this movie, but it gave me a headache.
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