a review of 千尸屋2

Hooptober Night Eleven: I'll admit that this one felt a lot more like a real movie than "House of 1000 Corpses", which came across as more of a shapeless mashup of all of Rob Zombie's favorite movies. Zombie is clearly drawing from the Tarantino/Rodriguez fake '70s B-movie playbook, and he does a good emulation of that style. But at the same time, I kind of wish that he had put some effort into getting the audience to actually like (or "like") his characters beyond whatever nostalgic associations they might have with the actors playing them. Nobody enjoys a relatable antihero or sympathetic monster more than me, but watching I couldn't help but think that Zombie was totally jazzed to have Sid Haig and Bill Moseley and Karen Black in his movie again and wanted that feeling to somehow magically transfer onto how we see their characters, and it just doesn't. Because at the very end, when the Fireflys are going into that Wild Bunch/Butch & Sundance blaze of glory, all I could think about was how about 30 minutes before this we'd just seen them torture, molest, and murder a whole family in a motel room, and as a result, I just couldn't feel what Zombie clearly wanted me to feel in that moment.