3 From Hell

Rob Zombie – 2019 – USA

Speaking as the author of what I believe to be the only monograph to date on Rob Zombie’s films, I’m sad to say that 3 From Hell is the second let-down in a row from the man I believed was on the cusp of auteur-hood after the brilliant Lords of Salem (2013). While 31 (2016) was - (in response to The Lords of Salem’s meager box-office) - clearly an attempt to make a more entertaining horror film more akin to House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), 3 From Hell makes a far more desperate beeline back to the safety of marketability by adding a third installment of what we now have to call the “Firefly Family Trilogy,” even though all three main characters clearly died at the end of The Devil’s Rejects, in an unmistakably un-survivable hail of bullets by state troopers. Mr. Zombie doesn’t even propose a suitably extraordinary explanation for how such a miracle occurred; the film just announces “oh, by the way, they didn’t die.” I don’t mind the sheer audacity of that at all, but you can only swallow it if there’s something creative to put in the place of logic. The real problem is that the very idea of a sequel completely invalidates and insults the powerful finale of The Devil’s Rejects, (Zombie’s second best film after The Lords of Salem), the whole point of which was the notion of a well-earned and final reckoning for the degenerate Fireflys. The scenes depicting their many terrible crimes are only palatable because we know there is a comeuppance in store for them. Now, though, Zombie doesn’t appear to care about any such nuances at all. The Twitterverse has informed him that people loved the Fireflys sadistically killing people, so he’s given them a movie that has that and only that. No irony, no insight, no expansion or even reevaluation of the themes of The Devil’s Rejects. It’s also a bit tasteless that when actor Sid Haig – (who played the patriarch of the Fireflys) – died at the commencement of shooting, Zombie didn’t delete his character’s function in the story entirely, as a tribute to Haig, but instead conjured up a new character out of nowhere, (a long-lost cousin), just because he still wanted to have three anti-heroes and keep the title of 3 From Hell. Having said all that, Zombie is no less talented. He has a definite visual flair and a knack for the grotesque, and both things are certainly present in the film. But those are skills that he should be putting to use in original films that take his filmmaking in a forward direction, not backwards. Judging by the abundance of material that was cut out of various films of his, it’s clear that he has no shortage of ideas. He once planned to move on from horror entirely. Personally, I don’t think he’d be any worse off now if he’d veered in the braver direction and obeyed his muse. It’s not like 31 and 3 From Hell became hits anyway. He might as well have taken the risk on more personal, artistic and experimental work.