This is Part 1 of our “2007 Year in Review” which will be followed by our Top Ten of 2007 and our recap of the little films that deserve an honorable mention.
Part 2: Top Ten Horror Movies of 2007
Part 3: 2007’s Best Alternative, Overlooked, Unappreciated, Direct to Video Horror Films
An examination of the films and careers of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth
by Gary G.
Sydney For the past six years the two most famous and controversial horror filmmakers have undoubtedly been Eli Roth and Rob Zombie. Though filmmakers as diverse as Neil Marshall, Alexandre Aja, Zach Snyder, Guillermo Del Toro, Lucky Mckee, Greg McLean, James Wan and Darren Lynn Bousman may have delivered more popular or critically acclaimed films, Roth and Zombie stand alone atop the pack as the most prolific horror filmmakers of their generation. Even filmgoers who haven’t seen one frame of any movie Roth or Zombie have made know who they are. Their persistent self-promotion and media appearances have made them the go-to-guys when the media wants to put a face to the current horror movie scene. Whether you love em both, hate em both or hate one and love the other you simply cannot dismiss them. This year each delivered a third film and contributed two of the fake trailers in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse. Horroryearbook will examine the filmmakers, their films and their critics.
It is odd how similar their career trajectories have been. All three of their films have been released within months of each other. While Roth’s debut film, Cabin Fever (2003), was making the festival circuit Zombie’s first film was having distribution troubles. Both films were eagerly awaited by fans and widely covered in the horror film press, with Fangoria and Rue-Morgue giving front page coverage to both. The films were, mostly, savaged by mainstream critics when released and drew widely divergent reactions from horror fans. In my opinion Cabin Fever is clearly the more accomplished picture. While it may not have delivered on the whole “balls to the walls” horror aesthetic that Roth claimed in his media interviews it nevertheless was a well made first feature. It is interesting how from the very beginning a huge segment of the horror film community turned on Roth. Maybe the expectations were too high. High praise from the likes of Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino may have loaded the film with too much critical baggage. The mallrat retards who snuck in to see Cabin Fever in late summer 2002 may have been bewildered by Roth’s blend of lowbrow humor and gross-out violence but many horror fans seemed to have never encountered a comic horror film before. And virulent charges of homophobia, racism and sexism were instantly lobbed at Roth and his film, which goes to show how incredibly stupid some fans can be. As if an artist cannot create characters who use politically incorrect language without being Adolph Hitler. These charges would continue to haunt Roth with his next film Hostel, in which the charges where even more wildly fanned. What was apparent to the viewer who cared to see it was Roth’s assured visual style, black sense of humor, and almost obsessive homage’s to his own favorite films. The observant viewer can easily spot the nods to Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Creepshow 2, The Thing, The Shining, Pieces, The Evil Dead among others. But most of all, for me at least, I was more impressed with Roth’s way with his characters. YES CHARACTERS.
I know that one of the most specious criticisms of Roth is that he doesn’t know how to write for characters. This is utter bullshit. Amongst the pack he is one of the more distinct character writers. The problem, not for me but for a lot of other people, is that he writes a specific type of character; obnoxious twenty-something’s. Roth’s characters offer the viewer very little, if any, sympathetic connection. If I could break some moviegoers of an bad habit it is to assume that because you don’t like a character that means that the writer is bad at character development. On the contrary if a character gets under your skin that much that the entire movie is ruined for you than I suggest that the writer may be better than you think. Do you really need to “like” a character to engage in a story. It’s not real life it’s a fucking movie. So what if Cabin Fever’s group of self absorbed college kids are unlikable. You’re not moving in with them. Your job as a moviegoer is to gauge who the characters are, likable or not, and their function in the story the writer is telling. Cabin Fever is filled with many telling character moments that reveal exactly how this group will fare in the ordeal to come. The vain law student, Jeff, wears an eye patch to bed which foreshadows what a little bitch he becomes when he ditches his friends and his triumphant cries at the end of “They’re all dead and I survived” as if he’d won a contest or something. The sexually aggressive Marcy flips her boyfriend over to finger his asshole which completely makes sense when in the midst of the horror she decides to just fuck Rider Strong’s brains out. Bert, the loud mouth, childish jerk of the group tries to steal a candy bar from the general store. The gang invites Dr. Mambo to party only after they know he has pot. These small character moments, and more, ably fit into the arc of the story that Roth is telling, which is how this superficial group of friends will eventually turn on each in the midst of the diseases’ outbreak which makes them vulnerable not only to the disease but more importantly to the locals they’ve been pissing off the entire time and who will eventually prevail over them. That is character development. And “Eww, I don’t like that guy cause he said squirrels were gay. He’s homophobic. He’s a meanie, beanie, bo-pheanie,” is not a valid criticism of the characters. Few filmmakers capture exactly how a lot of young people talk like Eli Roth. Sorry if this offends you but it’s true. Grow up people.
Rob Zombie’s film House of 1000 Corpses (2003) was so fucking insane anyone can be forgiven for calling it a bag of shit. In many ways it is. Corpses is all over the place. Part freak show, slasher movie, Psychotronic slide show and carnival geek act, Zombie’s psychedelic hillbilly gothic looked very much like an extended White Zombie video. Zombie sets up a great story then seems to get sidetracked every ten minutes with another insane Firefly family revue spot. The story then sinks into complete nonsense when we meet up with Dr. Satan. But what it lacked in narrative or dramatic thrust it made up in truly grotesque, disturbing imagery; the “Showtime” sequence and Sherri Moon’s ghoulish Betty Boop impression, the Halloween Party with Otis dressed in the skin of one of the victims’ father, Dr. Satan’s minions breaking open the casket with two of the victims inside, the production design of Dr. Satan’s lair. This is some horrifying shit. One of the criticisms aimed at Roth is more evident in Zombie’s film; bad character development. The four road tripping victims couldn’t be more obnoxious. The two female victims not only look exactly alike but are so bitchy and annoying it feels like Zombie didn’t realize that they were two separate characters. Zombie himself has admitted that he didn’t realize in the writing how harsh these two characters came out. Roth’s conception of his “annoying” characters is frequently in tune with the concept of his movie. Zombie’s characters, suffering under the weight of his hyper-active dialogue, are simply grotesque or annoying. When I first saw Copses at a packed Sunday multiplex showing, with some dude next to me eating an entire barbeque ribs platter he’d snuck in, I was as bewildered as the entire audience seemed to be. Repeat viewing’s have allowed me to ignore the sloppiness and enjoy the disturbing visuals, gruesome kill scenes and the bizarre and hilarious performances by vets Sid Haig, Bill Moseley and Karen Black. You have to put this movie into it’s proper context to enjoy it. Imagine it is 1972. Your in New York, on 42nd street. You stop into a grungy old movie theater for a horror feature and House of 1000 Corpses starts. You’d love it. That is if you’re into that sort of thing. And thirty years later you’d be telling your kids about how they don’t know what a real grindhouse movie is and tell them about this fucked up mess of a movie you saw. That’s what Zombie was trying to make but jacked up with MTV style edits and camera tricks. Unlike the well shot, well acted, special effects extravaganza that Tarantino and Rodriguez passed off as grindhouse fair, grindhouse films were far closer to the mess that Zombie made four years earlier. Successful in a conventional way? No. Successful in it’s own way? Yes. It was a Rob Zombie film. That pretty much says it all.
The sophomore films from Roth and Zombie were their biggest hits. Hostel and The Devils Rejects were immediately stuck with the moniker “torture porn”. But while Rob Zombie as filmmaker became something of a folk hero, bringing “grindhouse” cinema to the masses who never liked it in the first place, Roth became an odd target for moralistic, misguided critics. Even many horror fans seemed to have missed the point of Hostel.
You would’ve thought that 2006’s Hostel was an unreleased Jess Franco film from the vitriol directed at it. While no cinematic masterpiece it was miles above most of the major studio released horror crap. But something about it really got under peoples skin. Here again is the case of people turning their personal unease with a film into a reason to criticize it. Some people did not like the violence. Fair enough. Some didn’t like the long build up of the first hour. Another fair objection if you’re an impatient fourteen year old doofus. But what most people seemed to have had a problem with were the characters; a group of puerile, obnoxious, college jerks on a tear in Amsterdam for drugs and sex. Some people, smart people, were so annoyed by these characters that they checked out of the film enough to have missed the whole point. For instance, the review in Rue Morgue by publisher and editor-in-chief Rod Gudino, who writes…
Gudino goes on to say that the characters “set out on a quest to get stoned and laid, which they accomplish with some of the most shamelessly juvenile antics ever put before a sober post-graduate audience.”
and “by limiting itself primarily to males in the eighteen to 22 age range, Hostel compromises the little it has going for it, which is basically some respectable gore.”
Gudino ends with “your going to have to dig deeper into our psyche than frosh week to traumatize anyone outside of a stoned frat boy.”
What an interesting look into Gudino’s psyche this is. He mentions frat boys or the so-called “frat boy mentality” so many times you feel as if he may be wrestling with some traumatic adolescent experience at the hands of characters like those in the movie. Hostel has a remarkably simple concept -the ugly americans get caught up in the same web of exploitation that they were abusing. The juvenile antics of the lead characters is then completely necessary and warranted. Just because you have a bug up your but about “frat boys” does not allow you to substitute valid critical judgment for your personal vendetta’s.
Take a gander at some of the more misguided fan reviews on imdb for a touch of the really ridiculous. Hostel seems to make a lot of people, not just Rod Gudino, very touchy as well ramp up a curious sort of moral outrage from people who paid money to see a movie like Hostel. Some samples
From a mister nathan-moeller who then goes on to praise Saw 4, Underworld Evolution and the remake of The Hitcher all of which apparently required “use of the mind throughout”.
And from someone called : imajestr
For your information imajestr that was the character development. Sorry but Stephen Hawking was not a character in Hostel, frat boys were. Sorry if you and Rod Gudino missed that point but that’s not Eli Roth’s fault.
A little more from imajestr just cause I think it’s funny.
Maybe if you’d step out of your conventional thinking and stop trying to be deep, imajestr, you’d have realized that the first half of the movie was written like that on purpose, to show you the world in which these characters were reveling in, a world in which any pleasure is available for a price, and which would come back to, literally, bite them in the ass. A more mature, sophisticated traveler would never have fallen for the trap the “hostel” had set. But dumb, horny college kids would have.
And an unnamed reviewer from imdb offers this..
We get it. Okay, we get it. FRAT BOYS ARE EVIL! Maybe Roth’s piggish anti-heroes were a bit too believably wrought. Clearly many viewers simply could not get over spending an hour with such characters enough to actually gauge Roth’s motives. Once again. The whole hour long Porky’s set up is completely in tune with Roth’s concept of the movie. Were these critics too busy hating on “frat boys” to get this? If Roth makes a misstep it’s in making Paxton, the most hateful of the trio, the focus of our sympathies when Josh, the nice guy, is killed off. Josh and his subplot with the creepy German businessman was far more interesting. Roth goes to great length’s to show how reluctant Josh is with a lot of Paxton and Oli’s antics. He was our one sympathetic connection. Then Roth kills him off. Roth, god bless him, was trying to pull a “Psycho” style twist on us. But unfortunately, for the movie, it didn’t work since Josh’s torture was aired heavily in Hostel’s tv ad’s so we already knew he was a dead man. But sensitive viewers were turned off by the slight “gay” angle of this story line and conversely charged Roth with being a homophobe, closet homosexual, dog eater and the one who killed Jon Benet. Hidden in this subplot is a subtext that actually runs through to Hostel Part 2. On the train the creepy German guy says, as he eats a salad with his fingers, “I think people have lost their connection to the food they consume,” then rests his hand on Josh’s knee, which of course freaks Josh out. He then comes back to save Josh from the gang of bubble gum obsessed street kids. The German guy goes through a lot of trouble to connect with the boy he will ultimately consume/kill. The same way that Roger Bart’s character in Part 2 tries to connect with his intended. Consumption/Connection. If you were looking for something deep to chew on there it was, oh that’s right, you hate frat boys, sorry to disturb you, I’ll let you get back to that. With the one sympathetic character dead Roth then tries to imbue Paxton with some shred of compassion with the story of how he’s haunted by a drowning girl he failed to save. This was clearly Roth’s attempt to justify Paxton going back to into the hostel to save Kana, so that Roth can then reference the film Suicide Club when she throws herself in front of a moving train. I have a feeling this was not Roth’s choice. The entire scene where Paxton reveals the drowning story, then he and Josh chase someone they think is Oli into a museum of torture, seems shoved in after the fact. You could almost hear the producer’s script note that went “if Paxton is such a louse why would he go back to save the girl.” It would have been a braver choice had he still been an asshole and still saved the girl. People are like that. Crash won an Oscar for doing a similar thing with the racist cop played by Matt Dillon and the same critic’s were oh so impressed with how complex that was. And that movie was some kind of bullshit. I’m not claiming that Hostel is perfect but lets judge the film fairly and not with confused and misplaced moral indignation. One of the criticisms that I feel is perfectly true is that Roth does seem to have a problem with building suspense. His films are shocking, gruesome and outrageous but rarely suspenseful. Paxton’s discovery of the hostel is particularly uneventful; he’s taken to the hostel, he walks in, he sees some torture (through an open doorway twenty feet from the entrance) and they grab him. Not good, Eli. Since Paxton is the last man standing his discovery should’ve been a lot more exciting. After Paxton’s torture and escape we get a routine race for your life sequence leading to the climactic murder of the creepy German businessman. These are valid criticisms not personal knee-jerk reactions to so-called “frat boy mentality”. And correct me if I’m wrong but at any point do the characters say they are in a frat? Just emotionally sensitive viewers jumping to conclusions, I guess. Roth characters get very close to sounding and acting like a lot of young people today. I’ve met plenty of Bert’s and Jeff’s and Marcy’s and Josh’s and Oli’s and Paxton’s in my life. If you haven’t and insist that these characters are unbelievable you need to get out more.
Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2005) was a hit with audiences and, surprisingly, with critics as well. Here Zombie drops all of the flashy music video edits that made Corpses so obnoxious at times and provides a streamlined piece of retro exploitation. No other major filmmaker has come this close to recalling the gritty look and feel of seventies exploitation cinema. One point becomes very clear though; Zombie is in no way interested in his victim characters. He likes his monsters far too much. Roth’s victim characters may be annoying but at least they are distinct. Zombie’s victims are there to be murdered by his menagerie of degenerates, perverts and psychopaths. Which is why The Devil’s Rejects works so well. Every major characters is insane. The face off between the psychopathic Firefly clan and the vengeful Sheriff Wydell pits the audience in the middle of a war of crazy people. Everyone else is road kill. This is why House of 1000 Corpses didn’t play as well because we spend a lot of time with the four victims that not even Zombie cares to distinguish. With The Devil’s Rejects you can clearly see a concentration of Zombie’s particular aesthetic. Rejects is a tidy piece of pulp storytelling not the long music video that Corpses tended to be. Sure, his trademark dialogue can be a bit indulgent but it works with these characters. It wouldn’t for his next feature.
This year Roth and Zombie released their third films and their fortunes split. Zombie had a huge hit with his remake of Halloween. Roth’s Hostel Part 2 was a flop if only by expectation since the first Hostel opened at number one and grossed over eighty million dollars and Part Two only made a little over thirty million. But despite the diffrent financial fortunes both films would prove to be mistakes for both filmmakers. Hostel 2 would only serve to fan the flames of Roth’s critics and Halloween glaringly exposed the deficiencies in Zombie’s dramatic skills.
Hostel Part 2 was the better of the two films. I found it much more disturbing and twisted then it’s predecessor. Hostel 2 maintains the same basic set-up as Part One but with a trio of American female students substituting for the frat boys everyone hated so much. Roth then includes of a pair of American businessmen who become the newest hostel patrons as well as the torturers of two of our female travelers. An intriguing dramatic choice by Roth since the audience is fully aware of what’s going on it gives us another storyline to follow. There were enough surprises and grisly details to make this Hostel a more interesting experience than the first. For one thing the murders are a whole lot more horrific than in the first, mainly because these girls are not so unlikable but also because we get to see these scenes full out. Another problem I had with the first Hostel is that we didn’t see enough of what went on in those rooms. For instance why didn’t we see Oli’s murder and only the beginning of Josh’s. Roth brings the pain fo’ real this time. One of the most terrifying scenes of the year is the murder of Heather Mattarazzo aka Weiner Dog, hanging upside down and naked (See Pictures Here) as some crazy bitch caresses her body with a huge ass scythe and ultimately slits her throat and baths in her blood. The audience I saw this with was audibly unnerved. The demise of Bijou Phillips was suitably nasty and comes with an grisly twist when Richard Burgi’s buzz saw gets caught in Phillips’ hair and he freaks out, along with the audience. What’s more since she’s not dead the hostel “administrators” decide to try and sell her partially mutilated body at a cut rate. This is what was missing from Roth’s earlier film, the machinations of the hostel itself. We watch with increasing tension as the fates of the two businessmen and our heroines collide. Hostel 2’s disappointing box office was attributed to many factors; fatigue with so called torture porn, a general dislike of the first Hostel, and ,according to Roth, piracy of the movie, especially online. But it flopped for one specific reason. It is the same reason that Grindhouse flopped. It was released on a weekend it had no business being released on. In it’s first weekend Hostel 2 was competing with the star powered Oceans Thirteen, the number one film that week, and Surf’s Up, a big family film as well as the continuing summer blockbuster’s Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Knocked Up and Shrek 3. The Weinstein Brothers made the stupid decision to release Grindhouse on Easter fucking Weekend, as if families just back from celebrating the re-birth of Christ wanted to see Quentin Tarantino’s balls melted off. Listen folks, genre films rely a lot on what I call the Saturday Night Dead to fill out the seats not taken up by the faithful. You know the type, filmgoers who just see whatever’s popular that weekend no matter what it is and seem more interested in their concession stand purchases than the actual movie. When the Saturday Night Dead have something else to do your horror movie is gonna have a tough time making it to number one. That’s why horror films do well in the doldrums of the first few months of the year, when Hollywood shits out it’s b-level products, at the end of summer, when all the blockbusters have come and gone and, of course, the month of October. Releasing a horror movie at any other time of the year is a crap shoot. But since Roth’s critics are ignorant of this widely understood industry fact they used Hostel 2’s box office failure as a means of confirming their own prejudices against the filmmaker. As good as Hostel 2 was it would serve as a mistake for Roth because it would give those who dislike him more ammunition. They weren’t going to like it no matter how it turned out because they hate him, personally. I’ll expand on this after I get to the remake of Halloween.
The remake of Halloween should not have been made…By anyone. Zombie asserted that if it was going to be ruined by anyone it should at least be someone like him, assuming he means a horror fan and not today’s Hollywood hack of the moment. But after seeing what he came up with I think a lot of us would’ve preferred a hacked version. At least the hacked version wouldn’t have offered so much pretension with so little skill. We would have at least gotten a crappy carbon copy of the first instead of the matchbook serial killer psychobabble offered as insight into the Michael Myers character, bad, bad performances by the Rob Zombie Repertory Players, sloppy, shaky camera direction passing as suspenseful action and a completely lopsided dramatic structure that rushed through the stalking and killing of the babysitters in about twenty minutes in favor of the tired cliches of the first half.
What is painfully obvious is that Zombie seems to be a one note filmmaker. When writing for despicable character’s his rapid fire, profanity laced, show off dialogue works well. When almost every character talks like that, even characters that shouldn’t, it becomes immensely irritating. The Devils Rejects works because all the main characters are scumbags. In Halloween it seems as if Zombie had to turn the Myers family into a bunch of degenerate miscreants simply so he could get away with his brand of exaggerated dialogue. Zombie has said that he wanted the Myers family to be a more believable “lower middle class family” and “more like the life that I remember” So to Zombie a “believable lower middle class family” consists of a leering, perverted stepfather, a whorish teenage daughter and a fucked up, druggie, stripper mom. Where exactly did Zombie grow up, in Hell? Granted there are families like this and I’m sure many of them have produced a serial killer or two. Problem is those families don’t talk like that, no one does, not even Zombie himself, and if they do that accounts for them. Why does practically every character in the film talk like this with the exception of Dr. Loomis and the Strode family? This is pure Zombi-speak clumsily shoved down the throats of his character’s. As my friend of mine said, “Now that I hear that dialogue outside of The Devil’s Rejects, it makes me hate The Devil’s Rejects.” It’s a shame how Zombie felt the need to bend story and characters into a cinematic template he seems incapable of discarding. The problem, for Zombie as director if not even more for filmgoers is that the Zombie style is now so evident that it leaves him open for parody. How about instead of Rob Zombie’s Halloween we get Rob Zombie’s Rosemary’s Baby with Sherri Moon Zombie as a chain smoking slutty stripper Rosemary. Or Rob Zombie’s Poltergeist with a family of trailer park scumbags and their haunted trailer. Actually these sound pretty good, but you get my point. If Zombie insists on writing character’s the exact same way it means were going to get the exact same movie time and time again with the same actors, same dialogue just different character names. I just believe that Zombie can do better. It’s a shame because there is a glimpse of how powerful this version of Halloween could have been in the scene where Michael kills off the Strode’s. The scene preceding their murder is a simple glimpse of a pair of decent, loving, playful parents worrying about their adopted daughter. They are nice people. Their subsequent brutal murder is all the more disturbing. This is what Rob Zombie’s Halloween could have been. What it could’ve done better than the original. Because the one thing that, for all of it’s brilliance, Carpenter’s Halloween is not, is disturbing. Disturbing in the sense that the horrific, senseless brutality of Michael Myers destruction is felt. Scary and suspenseful? Absolutely. But not disturbing. Not in the way that real life murders often are. This one five minute sequence is truly disturbing. For all of it’s gruesomeness the rest of the Zombie’s film is not disturbing because it’s populated by gargoyles. This is clearly not what Zombie intended. Zombie wanted us to care about these people. Were we really supposed to shed a tear with the young-Michael-and-his-baby sister-in-happier-times slide show that plays over the end credits? You see, Eli Roth’s characters are assholes, and he knows it. Rob Zombie’s characters are assholes and he doesn’t know it.
If it seems that I am being tougher on Rob Zombie than Eli Roth there is a reason. It’s my hope that we can level the playing field because it appears that Roth is knocked a lot harder by certain parts of the horror movie press than Zombie is when in all fairness both filmmakers share the same strengths as well as the same weaknesses. Zombie is treated with kid gloves by the likes of Rue-Morgue and many critics while Roth has somehow become a villain for the same offenses as Zombie; shallow characters, shoddy story structure and lack of suspense. Why is this? Well part of it is Roth himself. There is so much obvious player hating here. He’s just too enthusiastic a character for some people. Never has a horror film director been happier being a horror film director. He never met a camera he didn’t like and he is ready to publicly defend himself against the most vicious personal attacks, like him being a misogynist homophobe, among other things. And his need to insert himself into his own and his buddies films, surely pisses people off. With a ton of press practically anointing him the face of modern day horror some can’t help but hate him. But I think it goes deeper. Roth simply doesn’t look the part the way that Zombie does.
Fans, lets be honest about ourselves for once. Most die-hard horror movie fans are socially awkward; the weird, intellectual, quiet types. Outsider’s are frequently attracted to the horror genre for many reasons that I won’t go into. Some of these outsider types then begin to adopt a lifestyle or look to further distance themselves from the larger society and reveal themselves to other fans of the genre by wearing black, garish tattoos, dramatic makeup and t-shirts that say stuff like “Fulci Lives” and such. Just look through any of the staff photograph’s in Rue-Morgue for further evidence. These are the Dark Types. Rob Zombie is one of them. Eli Roth looks and acts like one of the “frat boy” characters in his films. Roth is animated, gregarious, the type of guy who wants to play Beer Pong all night. Zombie is dark and serious, the type of guy who wants to read poetry in a graveyard. The Dark Types hate the Frat Boy Types. So it’s no wonder that Rue-Morgue, the premier horror magazine at the moment, purposely chooses to ignore Roth if they are not slamming him for imagined offenses and slavishly cover Zombie. Even before turning to film direction Zombie’s dark demeanor, music and videos all pointed to someone with a penchant for horror imagery. Roth just seems a little to close to his characters for comfort for the Dark Types.
Let’s not forget the Grindhouse trailers. All of the trailers were fun but for my money Roth’s Thanksgiving was the superior one. Many people simply didn’t get it. These are the types that rarely get anything that isn’t spelled out for them. For those of us who love early eighties slasher movies this was some type of emission from our dreams. The other trailers were clear spoofs of their type of film. Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, while funny, could have been a Mad TV sketch. You were supposed to laugh at it. You were supposed to laugh at Machete. You were supposed to laugh at Don’t. You were supposed to laugh at Thanksgiving too BUT you could literally stick the Thanksgiving trailer at the end of a Paragon video release right between the trailers for Funeral Home and Mongrel and it wouldn’t look out of place at all. Roth delivers what even the full length films in Grindhouse were not, the genuine article.
Let’s be honest, neither Roth nor Zombie has yet to truly deliver the classic horror film we’ve been waiting for from them. Neil Marshall, Lucky Mckee, and Christopher Smith (of Creep and Severance fame) kick Roth and Zombie’s ass but no one cares about them, though they are, with two great films a piece, the three best horror filmmakers working right now in my opinion. But Roth and Zombie have gotten close. For me, of the six films I’ve reviewed here, The Devil’s Rejects and Hostel 2 (thank you very much) are my favorites. I have immense fondness for both Cabin Fever and Corpses all though they both have problems. Hostel is a good film. Not quite as great as it could have been. And Zombie’s Halloween is an unfortunate misstep. But let me be clear. I Love These Guys!!! I love their enthusiasm for the horror genre and their commitment to breaking modern horror movies out of the PG-13-Michael Bay remake hell we’ve been subjected to recently. I am eager to see what they come up with next. Unlike a lot of current directors they have chosen to make themselves into media fixtures (I mean does anyone even know what Darren Lynn Bousman looks like). And this is probably why they and their work are alternately misjudged and overpraised depending on your view. But they are both relatively early in their filmmaking careers. I, for one, am sure that each filmmaker has at least one sure classic up his sleeves. My finger’s are crossed.
