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Synopsis: On the day before Halloween, 1977, four teenagers stop for gas at Captain Spaulding's "Murder Museum." On display are various tableaux culled from the annals of infamy, culminating in a local attrocity: the crimes of "Doctor Satan." One of our intrepid heroes pesters the surly Captain Spaulding into drawing a map to where the infamous Dr. Satan was lynched by an angry mob and off they go into a rainy night in the sticks. Before they reach their destination, they pick up a blonde hitch hiker, improbably named "Baby," who knows just where the spot they are looking for happens to be. It's near her house, as it so happens. Before they can get there, their tire is blown out by a mysterious figure with a sniper rifle. The hitchhiker invites our heroes to her house, where her brother has a tow-truck. Once there, they are introduced to her family. Baby's family is a gallery of freaks, from Mother Firefly, an oversexed, over-the-hill matron in drag queen regalia to "Tiny," a masked hulk with the mind of five year-old, to Otis, who is holding a squad of kidnapped cheerleaders captive for his own depraved pleasures... Things go from bad to worse. Mother Firefly's brood stage a vaudeville act for out heroes; when Baby's act starts coming on to the two boys, Denise puts her foot down and the four head out to their now-fixed automobile. But the Firefly family isn't going to let them get very far...

Meanwhile, Denise's father begins to get antsy when his daughter doesn't appear at the appointed time. He enlists the aid of the local sherrif's department, and they pay a visit to Captain Spaulding. Spaulding tells them where he sent the kids and the sherrif and his partner head out in search of them. The Firefly family doesn't like interlopers in their fun, and they dispatch the cops and Denise's father, then turn their fury on the kids, who eventually get their trip to Doctor Satan's laboratory...

Tod Browning's America: The thesis of The Monster Show, David Skal's wonderful history of horror movies, is that the genre is the freakshow and carnival of popular culture. Skal argues that the genre was shaped by Tod Browning, the director of The Unknown, Freaks, Dracula, and others, who once worked in a carnival and whose films explore primal passions as aspects of the funhouse. Who could forget the one-armed knife-thrower in The Unknown, the wedding feast in Freaks or the ghastly revenge the freaks wreak on Cleopatra and her lover, or the malicious ventriloquist in The Unholy Three? Browning's America, filled with cheap carnies, geek-shows, and side-show attrocities, Skal argues, is a carnival glass through which the entire culture of horror movies--indeed, through which all of the variant subcultures associated with horror and exploitation films--is colored.

In one degree or another, Rob Zombie's troubled homage to roadside massacre movie is the living end of Tod Browning's America. Zombie's film embraces weirdo culture with a vengeance and catalogues borrowings from every kind of disreputable lowbrow art form one can imagine, from bondage loops and nudie movies (allegedly purchased from the estate of the late Bob Crane), late-night horror shows, roadside tourist traps, punk rock, porno-shops, women in prison movies, cheerleader sexploitation movies, heavy-metal videos, drag queens, body-modification chic, and, of course, the rural roadside massacre movie. To an extent, The House of 1000 Corpses is more of a hall of mirrors than a carnival side-show, and the film endlessly reflects its sources without providing a primary innovation of its own.

Deep in the Heart of Texas: The obvious model for The House of 1000 Corpses is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which provides Zombie's film with its plot and its mode of attack. The movie is pointedly set a year before Halloween, a distinction the film emphasizes repeatedly. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, for all their surface similarities, occupy different sub-genres. Halloween is the cornerstone of the so-called slasher movie, while Chainsaw is the ne-plus-ultra in rural massacre films. The rural massacre movie has deep literary roots, drawing its influences from Southern gothic literature (the necrophilia in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," for instance, or the senseless carnage of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") and the types of unease the sub-genre trades in occasionally surface in more rarified films (Deliverance, for example). The brand of massacre movie that metriculates through Texas Chainsaw into The House of 1000 Corpses is the cruel cinema one finds in 2000 Maniacs or The Last House on the Left. tinged as they are with hints of class warfare and with intimations of life after the apocalypse. Zombie has taken these influences--ALL of them--and slapped a new cotton-candy paint job on them, replete with evil clowns and a garish midway.

I said before that the film endlessly reflects its sources. I'd like to expand on this a bit. Zombie has some rudimentary talent for directing. At least two of his sequences are visually arresting enough to mark the film as more than just an el-cheapo rip-off for the horror crowd. If the film were able to harness this talent for directing towards something with actual meaning, the film might bridge the gap from being an elaborate homage to a subversive horror movie. One could argue, I suppose, that the film's very nature is subversive, that it is a reaction to the cookie-cutter genre films that glut the marketplace, but that argument presents a film that is STILL reflecting movies themselves rather than tapping into the collective unconscious. The House of a 1000 Corpses always feels like it has been constructed from a manual. This is a problem. Failing to connect on any basic level with a reality beyond the movie screen, the horrors on display in this particular sideshow don't mean anything to the viewer. They don't scare in and of themselves, although some of the sights in this movie aggressively transgress the boundaries of good taste to no good effect.

The fact that The House of 1000 Corpses is really just a hollow echo chamber rather than a primal experience is doubly troubling in the face of the film's lack of empathy. Following in the footsteps of its primary inspiration, it presents a quartet of "heroes" that are singularly unsympathetic. Where Texas Chainsaw forced a certain amount of identification with its hapless young people through the simple virtue of giving the audience no choice, The House of 1000 Corpses permits a certain amount of empathy with the family of killers. The killers in Chainsaw are inscrutable, but the killers in THIS movie are charismatic (or as charismatic as degenerates with bad teeth can get). The bluster of Sid Haig is endearing in comparison with the unpleasant bourgeois snottiness of our quartet of kids, and the Firefly family is certainly stocked with memorable grotesques. Given the overall direction of the film, and the way that it ends, The House of 1000 Corpses ends up as an elaborate snuff film.

But even this wouldn't bother me if the film was genuinely disturbing. It has some surface style, but no real story construction. It doesn't build suspense. It throws unpleasant images at the screen, but it doesn't give those images a broader meaning that would make them scary. While the film isn't a total debacle, it stands as a harsh demonstration that love for the genre doesn't necessarily equal aptitude for it...