It took three years before Lions Gate finally jumped on board as this movie was moved from the major motion picture back-burner to actual print, but this project probably should have remained just as dead as the corpses.
House of 1000 Corpses is a gory homage to the slasher flicks of the 70's that never really lives up to the standards of those films it imitates, despite some creative directing by Rob Zombie (yes, the musician known for his cheesy music videos), who also wrote the script.
The film is set on Halloween eve in 1977, where a group of teenagers on a cross-country excursion, happen upon The Museum of Madmen and Monsters, a roadside sideshow run by the strange Capt. Spaulding (Sid Haig). Here, they are told about a local legend of torture and murder and decide to seek out the local landmark: a tree where the murderous madman was hanged.
On the way, they pick up beautiful blonde hitch hiker (Sheri Moon), who leads them to a house inhabited by her family of nut jobs, including the pale and dead-looking Otis (Bill Moseley), the lewd Grandpa Hugo (Matthew McGrory), and the monstrously deformed Tiny (Dennis Fimple). At this point, all hell breaks loose. .
Despite the vivid attention to details in terms of the flooding of limbs and blood splattering all over the place, the film never really gets off the ground.
The violence is so gruesome and completely random that at times it is hard to follow. However, the blood soaked scenes are the least of this movies problem. .
There is absolutely no flow to the script. None of the characters are really developed. Towards the end of the film, one of the teenagers imprisoned by the psychotic version of the Addams family seems to have lost all hope. We don't know anything about her, and all of a sudden, her father comes from nowhere tom try and save her. You"re left asking yourself, where did he come from?.
Torture and murder occupy the last two-thirds of the film, without an attempt at an explanation or a method to the madness.