Well that was disappointing. Granted I've said before that I'm not a big Rob Zombie fan, although I do like House of 1000 Corpses and I actually don't mind his Halloween remake. However, this is definitely closer to something like Devil Rejects and I wasn't a fan of that movie. The best things going for it is Richard Brake's maniacal Joker esque performance and a certain scene involving chainsaws. I really dug the violence/gore overall in this movie, but Zombie usually does that stuff well anyways.

Everything else is done in typical Rob Zombie fashion though. Unlikeable characters, cringe worthy dialogue, but worse of all Malcolm McDowell had absolutely nothing to do here.

In the 1970s, a caravan of carnival performers traveling a desolate and dusty part of America are abducted on Halloween night, imprisoned in a labyrinthine factory, and forced to play a 12-hour game of survival in which they are hunted by outlandish fiends with names such as Death-Head and Doom-Head. This is the story of 31, the sixth feature film by heavy-metal icon Rob Zombie. It is a type of retreat by Zombie after the more abstractly macabre The Lords of Salem sharply divided his fan base—he is again firmly in the realm of chainsaws and clowns and swearing country cousins and operating in a more mercenary spirit than he did while producing his extreme-cinema magnum opus The Devil's Rejects—but it is a nastily fun and stylish romp despite its familiarity. It should modestly please viewers such as myself with a soft spot for Zombie's soiled-and-stained aesthetic and jolly-vulgar sense of humor. And it will be despised by his avowed detractors and win no new converts to either side. The highlights are the fun-house-by-way-of-Hell-on-LSD art direction and a striking performance by character actor Richard Brake as the aforementioned Doom-Head. The character, an angular and toothy murderer-for-hire whose jaundiced worldview evokes the Joker or even No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh, outshines the more rudimentary material around him and is a truly fearsome creation.

B

I'm mildly excited for this but cautious. I was obsessed with Zombie's films when I was younger but now the only ones I actually love are The Devil's Rejects and surprisingly Halloween 2, which is one of my favorites of the Halloween franchise and massively underrated, IMO. I thought Salem was terrible.