FrightFest

Shite!! Give up Rob and stick to music. Also, if you decide to make another film, use a steady cam!!!!!

7/10 - Nice to have some old-school gore... but the mock-Tarantino opening dialogue dragged, and the combat scenes were generally flicker-cut to crap.

7.5/10 - Pretty much what you expect from Rob and I liked Brake's performance. The shaky cam made the action difficult to follow and I didn't really like the industrial setting for the game, I never really felt a sense of location there.

Overall though there was enough for me to enjoy.

Couldn't help but like this from the opening moment when Richard Brake appeared onscreen in glorious black and white (nice to have an articulate psycho for once). There was no pretence to the film, being little more than an excuse for loads of violence (loved the demented three pronged chainsaw battle). Most horror films can't get away with such a basic approach (hello Blood Feast) but 31 certainly worked for me and then some. The perfect follow on to Realive as they were polar opposites. 8/10.

Average "Running man gore horror".Really liked House of 1000 corpses, Devil Rejects but his films are getting so predictable and cliché. Wish he would break his own rules a bit more. Best soundtrack though and kudos for using older female actress.

wakko wrote:Really liked House of 1000 corpses, Devil Rejects but his films are getting so predictable and cliché. Wish he would break his own rules a bit more.

I can't disagree with you there. I like Rob Zombie's films, I like the "talent pool" of actors he works with, I like his 1970s obsession, I like the music he chooses for the soundtracks but it is all starting to feel very formulaic. He's the Quentin Tarantino of horror.

I struggled to warm to this, especially in the early scenes where not only was the dialogue unfunny (like QT in Death Proof), it was also virtually unintelligible. The characters weren't very likeable. The shakey-cam action scenes were infuriating. But by the end I still felt myself being drawn into it. The guy has talent, no doubt about it. But it's time to shake it up a bit.

In some ways Rob Zombie seems to be going backwards as director, cannibalising his own work for ideas (white trash, evil clowns, 70s grindhouse aesthetic, Nazis) and doubling down on things that don't work, particularly the bad dialogue and giving his wife increasingly prominent parts, so that she's now the lead character and plated with plot armour. Although the hero characters tend to act rationally, the villains do not, as they are given to monologuing and just seem to mess around with the characters rather than trying to kill them. Or at least, I think they do: Rob Zombie's shakeycam shooting of action here is some of the worst I've seen, which is counterproductive because the gore and the violence is one of the few places where Rob Zombie still excels.

Probably a new genre would be refreshing. A 70s werewolf film on acid with a nice soundtrack would be great! Something I believe Rob Zombie could easily pull off.

Another great film and Blake's performance was terrific . I think he could make a good Joker in batman !

Naff.

Boring and predictable but at least Doom-Head was an effective villain, which due to the ending ended up making him some kind of anti-hero and Zombie not having the balls

Currently on Amazon Prime and Shudder.