31 (2016)

Rob Zombie’s “31” had been one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year.  Not because his track record is glowing with cinematic wonders, in fact, far from it.  His “House of a 1000” corpses had humour and more than a dash of style, especially the opening 15 minutes or so.  The rest of the movie deteriorated into a mess, but it showed some ability to tell a story.  Since then, his remake of Halloween was nothing short of a travesty.  An ugly, dumbed-down, unsubtle, stylistically bankrupt version of a masterful movie insulting John Carpenters lyrical and stylish brilliance.  Still, some flashes in Zombie’s Halloween were not awful though overall, it was not even a pale imitation of the classic but more a somewhat brain dead remake that nobody asked for and wanted.

The resounding memory of the Zombie Halloween was how he displayed an ability to drag his film to a trailer trash aesthetic with the subtlety of a hammer blow.  It was a dreadful film, like a bad smell that follows you around.  

A year or two on, Rob Zombie went on to deliver Halloween 2, which once again displayed a remarkable and notable ability to produce a loud, messy, grungy, bloody and garbled sequel to his shambolic first attempt.  Zombie’s die-hard fans lapped it up, but the rest of us were once again left floundering at the man’s ability to turn everything he touches into something resembling “trailer trash”.  Halloween 2 was once again a loud, aggressive mess of a film with the aesthetic of a pile of garbage.

However, despite the lack of cinematic style of his Halloween efforts, there was a flickering hope that maybe one day he would strike the right chord and merge his world of grunge to something that would resonate visually as well.  The hope was that “31” would be that realization.   Alas, within minutes of the films running time, it becomes miserably clear. Rather than develop a cinematic style and an ability to engage his audience with his skill, unfortunately, what is on display is like a bloated, overblown, indecipherable, self-indulgent and artistically dire piece of garbage that seems to be his cinematic signature.

The story involves a bunch of degenerates (always led by the feisty Sherri Moon Zombie) who become entangled with a bunch of demented “clowns” to hideous, nightmarish effect.

There follows a cocktail of dizzying images shot with a jittery, frenetic handheld camera style that attempts to impart some urgency or reality to the film. Still, in actuality, all it does is look like an incoherent mess.  None of the cast characters evokes the slightest sympathy, and none of them is fleshed out so that the audience might give a damn about what happens to them on screen. 

The cast includes Malcolm McDowell and Meg Foster from the past, and though usually, that would be something to look forward to here, they just appear as though they are there for the paycheck and little else. They are each more despicable than the next, and I found myself rooting for them all to be butchered as quickly as possible so that the flailing mess of a movie would come to a swift end and the torture of watching it would be over. 

The film soon develops the sensibilities of yet another torture porn style title with loud, garish performances that are entirely lacking in even some rudimentary wit to make them bearable.

The film in itself is a form of torture for the audience that views it; an endurance test and the film festival audience crammed into the theatre remained unmoved and uninvolved by what was unspooling on screen.  If there was supposed to be humour, it certainly didn’t work because nobody in a rather large audience even snickered throughout the film with one or two giggles heard. At the same time, California Dreaming played in one of many absurd scenes.

Rob Zombie has done it again; it has taken a half decent premise and then delivered a film to appeal to an audience restricted to his “selective” fan base.  A fan base appears to be the mirror image of his own cannibalized version of cinematic “style”.

The best moment by far was when the end credits roll, signalling release from a harrowing experience.  There is simply nothing to recommend in a film as foul as this one, absolutely nothing.  It’s a bankrupt film, and worse is utterly humourless and just a total bombed-out mess.  Rob Zombie’s glib in-jokes don’t count for humour, sadly though hipsters may differ on that point.

Rob Zombie may have one or two nifty ideas, but his storytelling style is yet to exist or develop into a craft that involves his audience.  There was no visual flair, absolutely zero tension or suspense, no build-up to a climax, nothing.

Rob Zombie’s “31” is a memorable film but for all the wrong reasons. This was a painful cinematic experience; it was utterly tasteless, lacking in style or flair and artistry and It is hard to recall a more loathsome film in many a moon.   A massive shame as an audience committed to the excitement of the promise of something great but left high and dry.

A horror fan has excellent powers of endurance, and sometimes wishful thinking can get you happily to the finish line with a smile on your face. Even so, some walked out of the cinema with big smiles on their faces, and you heard some comments like “that was so “Banging”, and better still “that was the first Zombie movie my girlfriend has ever seen and she loved it”.    Enthusiasm to the point of self-deception.

The bottom line in my book for filmmaking, or any form of art, is its ability to ENGAGE its audience.  Even the worst, most ridiculous movies can engage. The biggest fault with “31”, despite its oh-so-trendy throwaway references to superior films and its calculated one-liners, was its total inability to engage its audience.  Still, Rob Zombie remains clueless. Every joke fell flat, every reference was a yawn, and his characters monologues were calculated cool. That was anything but that.  However, which way you want to look at it – this film was physically distressing.