October Horror Challenge 2022 #28: "31"

After watching Rob Zombie's journey into campy family friendly comedy last night, I decided to check out one of his grisly horror flicks that I've never seen before, so I picked this movie, one that managed to slip by me in 2016 when it came out. I didn't know much about this movie going in, so I was exceited to check it out.

This movie is about five carnival workers who are kidnapped the night before Halloween and held captive in a mysterious compound. Their captors at the compound force them to play a sick, twisted game of life or death called 31, which requires them to fight off a seemingly endless parade of psychotic maniacs over the next 12 hours. Will any of them survive the ordeal?

This movie starts off with a bang as a psycho takes an axe to a guy, but then the movie follows Rob Zombie's common track of listening to people who don't know how to shut up talk too much for the next 25 minutes or so. Not that I know how to shut up either, so I'm sure if I were in a horror movie people would think the same thing about me, but none of these characters are very likeable, so I had a hard time paying attention while they rambled on and on. Trauma is the great equalizer, thoguh, and once the hapless cast are kidnapped and put into mortal danger, I sympathized with them.

This movie reminds me of other movies, like The Hunger Games, Cube, Surviving the Game, and most recently Escape Room, where groups of people are forced to go through ordeals and be hunted like animals until only one of them survives (if any of them make it that long). There are other mvies like this as wel, though I can't think of the names right now. This is a worthy addition to this sub-subgenre, since by the end of the movie I cared enough about the cast of characters to want at least one of them to survive. The gore is definitely sadistic and brutal, as in most of Zombie's films, and anyone who doesn;t like clowns will find a lot to fear here, since the killers dress up like clowns. Overall this movie is flawed, but I found enough to recommend it by the end that I'm glad I gave it a chance.