31

Rob Zombie – 2016 – USA

Though it seems to be pleasing horror fans and admirers of Rob Zombie’s earliest couple of films, 31 is nevertheless a bit of a letdown after what I regarded as his masterpiece, The Lords of Salem (2013).  Zombie seems to be feeling the wages of his artistic choices up through his last feature, which led him progressively from the unevenly tongue-in-cheek spook-house spirit of House of 1000 Corpses (2003) to the European-tinged atmospherics and all-out surrealism of The Lords of Salem a mere ten years later, which was received just well enough to gain a bit of a cult following, but not enough to make an impact at the box office.  I remember that he barely even stumped for the film even while it was still struggling in theaters.  It was is if he could already see his plans for the future – which included breaking out of the horror genre – dissipating before his eyes.  31, which was crowd-funded – (I’m proud to have donated $50 to the cause) – has a feeling of resignation about it.  It lacks none of Zombie’s characteristic style and inventiveness (and sleaze), but it is still very much a step backwards; a rather safe and familiar pastiche of elements for which he is known, even down to setting it, yet again, on Halloween in a romanticized (or nightmaricized, more accurately) American southwest of the 1970s.  Technically set an exact year before the events of House of 1000 Corpses, 31 unfolds a similar plot involving an unwary group of travelers being waylaid by a gang of psychos to be toyed with as pawns in a sadistic game.  It seems Malcolm McDowell and two rich old crones have been running an annual underground death match in some kind of abandoned industrial complex out in the desert.  They wager on how long their kidnapped victims can survive against a group of freakish power-tool wielding killers.  While fast-paced and entertaining, the film is also claustrophobic, which correlates closely to its budgetary constraints that Zombie must have found disheartening.  I don’t see Zombie as a victim of the system, though; my feeling is that he should have found a way to make a far more original and inspired work no matter how little time and money he had to work with.  Instead, he seems to have half-heartedly made a show-of-good-faith effort to restore the marketability of his name with a concise action-horror flick free of (almost) any artsy pretensions.  I say ‘almost’ because he does reserve one distinctive flourish for the very end of the film, something much more in line with the ambiguous finale of The Lords of Salem, almost as if to announce that the auteur is not dead yet even though he has been impelled to restrain himself this time around.