![]() It’s the Four Aces Diner, at 14499 East Avenue Q, on the northwest corner of East 145th Street, about five miles east of Palmdale in the California desert. Sadly, there is no ‘Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen’ to visit in ‘Ruggsville, Texas’, but the building itself is real enough, in a Hollywood kind of way. Rob Zombie delivers the kind of balls-out horror movie all 12-year-old boys want to make, before dreary good taste saps that furious energy. Spaulding’s unpredictable attitude ensures no one knows how he will act toward them.Hooray, as they say, for Captain Spaulding. ![]() I mean, you ain’t done fuck-all to cheer me up since you got here!” Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding, a grouch with clown makeup, steals the show in his few scenes. There’s daughter, Baby ( Sheri Moon Zombie), a bratty cowgirl who at one point, gets so annoyed at cheerleaders taken hostage, she berates them, “I thought you kids were all about team spirit. While these two characters are frighteningly spectacular, every one of the Firefly members are entirely distinct from one another There’s the towering Tiny ( Matthew McGrory), dressed in a turtle-neck sweater, his disfigured face behind a mask. The scene goes nearly silent, and it’s especially agonizing as the added slow-motion stretches out the inevitable bullet Otis will send into the Deputy’s head. During the previously mentioned police standoff, Otis holds Deputy Steve ( Walton Goggins) at gunpoint in a wide shot. As for Moseley, he’s an absolute menace at any given time, no one forgets how lethal he can be. She adores her children, whose homicidal urges aren’t flaws to her, they are signs she raised them well. That she does, playing the matriarch like a tipsy, horny, Southern belle. Mother Firefly would get recast in Devil’s Rejects, so here is Black’s time to shine. “Her mama said, ‘Come feed desire.’ Her brother said, ‘Hey, throw him on the fire!’” It sums up the Firefly family through grim, heavy metal foreshadowing.Īmong the cast, Karen Black as Mother Firefly and Bill Moseley as Otis B. “She had a corpse under her bed, she had her fun but now he’s dead,” the vocals let out. It all begins with a song during the opening credits, from Zombie and named after the movie’s title. The soundtrack enhances the danger to these killers. House of 1000 Corpses isn’t too concerned about the abducted victims though, the movie’s main attraction belongs to the monsters. In Zombie’s film debut, Wilson plays Bill, who's killed and has his body undergo a heinous “Fishboy” transformation, the laughs coming from those who maimed him. Rainn Wilson slices off and puts on a dummy’s face during CPR training in The Office, which is done for audience laughs. It’s haunting and tragic, a rare burst of sympathy among a runtime full of suffering. The father is killed, a fleeting, happy memory of his family is the last thought that goes through his mind, depicted as a grainy, home movie. The father of one of the captive young adults notifies the authorities about his missing daughter, leading to a standoff between the cops and the Firefly family. It happens for a less delirious impact and more for a sudden burst of sadness toward the end. ![]() The sets are stylish, as is the editing, split screens and moments that loop back onto itself is just the start.ĭuring a killing or the moments leading up to one, there are crosscuts to either archival footage, character flashbacks, or negative images, each creating a disorienting effect. Satan ( Walter Phelan) has been residing, hooked up to a mechanical apparatus, free to experiment on human subjects. Without any warning, she barges into a subterranean lair where the desiccated Dr. Then everything goes completely unhinged, as audiences go down a rabbit hole where Denise ( Erin Daniels), the last victim, navigates a tunnel of cob-webbed, skull-imbedded walls. ![]() Over at the chaotically, messy Firefly home, the dinner table is packed with candles, which can spark someone’s pyrophobia. To set the mood, nighttime scenes are lit in blue hues with a rain machine splashing about. The sets are extravagant, in color and precise details, thanks to Zombie and art director Michael Krantz. While Zombie dismisses it, the so-called “wackier” tone works to the first movie’s benefit. But as we were shooting, that's the tone that it was turning out to be.” The same can’t be said for the next two sequels, The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and 3 From Hell (2019), which went down a gritty and bleak path. Or as Spaulding credits for the latter, “our local heroes.” Talking to AV Club in 2005, Zombie states, “The first film turned out a little wackier and campier than I originally intended. When he isn’t selling fried chicken or ringing up a customer, Spaulding is conductor to the “The Museum of Monsters & Madmen,” a low-budget ride that has to be manually pushed through animatronics of serial killers, known and unknown. ![]()
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