Impressed by rock star/director Rob Zombie's professed hatred of mainstream fright flicks, his love of 70s classics like "The Hills Have Eyes", and news that Universal dropped him like a hot potato, fans have been incontinent with anticipation awaiting the release of "House of 1000 Corpses".
After three years of waiting, though, the finished product is one of the biggest letdowns of the year.
"House" begins with four kids stumbling across a gloriously freakish Museum of Monsters and Madmen, run by bonkers clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig, insanely OTT and brilliant value).
After hearing about the local legends of ghosts, ghouls and serial killers, the kids decide to do some investigations of their own, running across a psycho family who invite them to stay for dinner. Guess who's on the menu?
Throw together a kaleidoscopic mishmash of every great, cutting-edge horror film from the 70s (in particular Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Funhouse"), add some cult genre actors (Sid Haig from the classic "Spider Baby", Bill Moseley from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2"), then shake really, really hard, and you've got a fair approximation of Zombie's filmmaking technique.
Strung together with a migraine-inducing MTV aesthetic, this trawl through B-movie horror flicks plays like a fan film with a multi-million dollar budget.
While Zombie's love of the horror genre is readily apparent, this is a travesty of everything he professes to adore, a tour-de-farce of depressing inanity, that's unable to do anything more than offer a messy, incoherent pastiche of other, better movies.
It's quite unlike anything you've ever seen - or will ever want to see again.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
