Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

House of 1000 Corpses – movie review

You may have heard of this movie. Rom Zombie’s first film. I heard about it something like, 3 … maybe 4 years ago. At the San Diego Comicon in … 2000, I think it was, I saw a 30-minute behind the scenes featurette about it, predicting that it would be in theatres Halloween, 2001. Except that then it didn’t. Some sort of hub-bub about it being too awful for human eyes or some such. I remember reading reviews by people (people who had seen advance research screenings) whose lives revolve around gore and gory horror movies saying that the gore in House of 1000 Corpses was gratuitous. That it was over-the-top. Universal wouldn’t go forward with it. Rob fought and bought the rights to it after a long struggle, then began looking for a studio that would help him finish it and then distribute it. MGM was almost in on the deal, but Rob said something that didn’t synch with their PR, and they pulled out. Eventually he hooked up with Lion’s Gate, got the film finished, and cut two versions. An ‘R’ rated versions which was just released into theatres nationwide this weekend, and an ‘uncut’ version which will be released on DVD later this year. I just watched the ‘R’ cut.

I would like to begin by saying that this movie far surpassed the lowered expectations I had for it. FAR surpassed my expectations. Admittedly, after hearing years and years of bad reviews from the intended audience of the movie, after hearing about how Rob Zombie himself was disappointed with every cut of the movie at least until last fall, after not finding a single review of it to read, and hearing people coming out of the theatre saying they were disappointed, or they didn’t like the ending… I had lowered my expectations a notch or two. And it was better than I had expected it to be when I first heard about it. Go Rob!

It was scarier and funnier and sexier and at least as crazy as I had hoped it would be. I could see some places where it had clearly been edited down and/or re-cut and/or re-framed to reduce the amount of actual gore on the screen, but it was still plenty gory. Better, seeing places where I knew they’d filmed more, and more detail, than they were showing just made me happier to think of getting the DVD later, to see Rob’s entire vision. To see his masterpiece the way he intended it.

Did I mention sexy? Okay, okay, I’ll admit I’m a little …twisted in the head… but man does Rob know how to mix the sex and the violence. How could you help being turned on as she flew out of nowhere, knocking her victim to the ground and then stabbed again and again as her white flowing dress became a sticky red mess and her happy-go-moinkely lucky-schpedoinkely smile and laugh rang out across the too-crowded-with-crosses cemetary? Or earlier, with the first shot of the victim, bruised and bloody and dirty and tied to the bed crying, but wearing the cutest little dress you ever did see, just so, with her make-up done up as though by a doll in her sleep, even just for a second but burned into my retina and into my mind – erotic and troubling at the same instant.

Hmmm… the basic story is simple. Four young adults, two men and two women, are on a road trip. They stop for gas in a small town in the middle of the night and fall into the trap of the local mass-murderers. Terror ensues. The whole thing is set in the late seventies, and it’s more than a little wacky, but in a way I get along with fine. If I’d been one of their victims, they’d probably ended up adopting me…

Anyway, I uhh… I liked the movie a lot more than I thought I would, and I’ll probably buy the DVD (used, of course). There was a lot of really great, really captivating cinematography, and also a lot of experimental cinematography and video and DV mixed with the film in a mostly-effectively-jarring way. The casting was well done and most of the acting was spot-on. It is gory. It isn’t going to win any Academy Awards. But it does what it attempts with excellent gusto. It’s a horror movie, but not a particularly startling or pensive movie, as recent ‘horror’ movies have been. Really it’s just they story of how one twisted family likes to spend Halloween. Nothing YOU should be afraid of… unless you happen to be passing through their little town…

Who needs a business model?

I don’t remember if I mentioned it here or not, but for a while there I was thinking of submitting New Comic to Modern Tales. See, Modern Tales has a ‘vacancy’ of sorts because Jon and MT agreed that he would do Patent Pending on goats.com instead of Modern Tales. So they put out a call for submissions for comics that could perhaps fill this vacancy. And I thought New Comic would be a good submission. I consider it my best comics work to date. I don’t know whether it fits with what Modern Tales is looking for, but I’m sure that if I said I would, I could pretty easily keep up an every-other-week update schedule for it.

*changes tracks in mid-stream*

If you ask most people who do web comics (that are aware of the print-comics industry) what their reasons for doing a webcomic are, not facing the editorial control of a syndicate will likely be among the reasons. They want to be able to write what they want, to have storylines be as banal or controvercial as it behooves them to create, and to not have to answer to corporate america about it. To have long-running stories or one-a-day jokes about playing video games, and not to have to worry about whether some executive thinks they appeal to a broad enough audience. To be able to use profanity, or whatever they want. But really, so that they don’t have to answer to anybody byt themselves (and maybe their audience) about their comic.

*Clank-clank! Tracks changing again*

So, MT was asking for stuff like a description of the path the comic was to take, of the characters and settings of the comic, the themes, all normal stuff. They asked for a link to the comic if it exists, or to drawings/sketches if it didn’t exist yet. I thought, no problem. I have an idea of where New Comic is going, and I could easily get a 4th episode of it online before the April 15th deadline, so there’d be plenty to look at, and an interesting and complicated story to look forward to. Up until about a week ago, this is what I planned to do. And I didn’t post anything when I changed my mind, because I was giving myself leeway to change it back.

Except that as of right now I haven’t drawn line one of the fourth installment on paper, and to keep the quality level where I want it, and because I’m going to be in Phoenix Monday and Tuesday (the 15th) and unable to work on it I’d have to get the whole thing done tonight, I’m not going to try to get a fourth installment done before the deadline.

There’s something else though, other than procrastination. There’s this weird feeling at the back of my creative drive that keeps telling me not to sign on with Modern Tales because “they’re just another syndicate.” (Plus, they obviously are trading on the name of Modern Evil…) My mind tried to convince me otherwise – they’re in it for the creators, not for themselves. They don’t own the rights to the comics and you can stop at any time – as evidenced by Jon stopping. They don’t take editorial control or censor people – there was an entire comic on their site about a rabbit’s hardon! But that nagging feeling kept nagging and I decided that I could just keep doing New Comic, just keep posting it here on Modern Evil. The potential for income that Modern Tales represents will not exist here, but that’s not Why I Do Online Comics, is it?