Lord of Salem (2013)

[MouthForWar]

[jellydonut25]

[MouthForWar]

[jellydonut25]

[MouthForWar]

[MouthForWar]

[MouthForWar]

[klen7]

[king_ghidorah]

[MekaGojira3k]

[MouthForWar]

[king_ghidorah]

[lhb412]

[klen7]

[RobD]

[jellydonut25]

[MouthForWar]

[william newell]

[MouthForWar]

As long as I get a good deal on royalties, I'm in.

[william newell]

[ebirahsmeg1]

[jellydonut25]

welp, this sucked. spoilers abound, but trust me, you don't care.

No, the "evil band" thing isn't as bad as it sounds in the synopsis, and no, the movie doesn't assert that the Salem Witch Trials were in any way good, as it basically says that the few legitimate witches that were killed didn't lose anything important through their deaths.

oh, and I thought the score was pretty good. I found myself wishing the movie was living up to its score, that what was happening on the screen was half as dramatic or significant or earnest as the score was.

but, it's not a movie, well, maybe it is because the word movie is derived from moving picture, but it's not a STORY. A story needs to have a beginning a middle and an end. This has a beginning. and it KIND OF has an end...and then it's got "scary" images and Kubrickian ripoff shots that try to pass for a "middle" but the overall result is that:

Heidi is a radio DJ and for some reason never remotely fully explained (other than a "curse" on her ancestry...but forget asking WHY this curse never amounted into anything until NOW...the answer is "because") she's targeted by a coven of witches to give birth to some random assortment of tentacles.

No, really, that's the WHOLE story...oh and Heidi is also a former drug addict, so the token character who's supposed to care about her just thinks she's back on drugs.

the cast all just walk around like zombies from place to place, doing things because they are in the script, and who can blame them? When there's no story to read to try to understand why your character might act THIS way or THAT way, then how can you be expected to put any emotion into your performance? I mean, Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, Bruce Davison, Meg Foster, and yes, even Sheri Moon Zombie since I don't find her to be THAT bad of an actor (she gives spirited performances as Baby in both House and Rejects), and THIS was the best Rob Zombie could get out of these people? Is he serious?

This thing only runs 101 minutes, and I had to split it into two viewings. It's so incredibly DULL...I kept waiting for someone, something, somewhere, somehow, to tell me what was at stake here, what the endgame was...WHY anything in this movie was happening and I should care and HOW anybody could POTENTIALLY have stopped it, even a simple "It would bring about the end times and the only way it can be stopped is if Ken Foree shaves".

And we can't even care about "the destruction of an innocent girl" because, (1.) we're not given much of a reason to care about Heidi in the first place (other than the dog she owns) and (2.) she doesn't really get destroyed, she becomes exalted...y'know for someone whose family is 'cursed' it seems odd that she basically becomes a holy figure to this coven.

I can't believe how much it feels like Zombie has regressed as a filmmaker here. My biggest complaint about House (and then it was a small step back he seemed to take with his first Halloween film) was that he did too much imitation, didn't try anything new, and for a guy who seems so insanely original to try nothing new, it was disappointing. Here, he blatantly rips off other, better filmmakers at every turn, most notably Kubrick and even more specifically The Shining. That takes some balls, to rip off the most well-known film from such a highly respected director.

Zombie can't shock us with the violence here because it all feels so watered down, and he's far too late to the game for this level of "shock horror" to work on us, just as he's far too advanced as a filmmaker to be forgiven for such a sloppy mess of a plot. He manages to create SOME atmosphere, but much of that is from the score, and the atmosphere is never filled with anything.

I'm as big of a Halloween 2 apologist as you're likely to find, and I love Devil's Rejects, but I think it's time to admit that that while I like the IDEA of Zombie as a filmmaker, the guy just isn't very talented when it comes to moviemaking. His "homages" come off as ripoffs and his new ideas hit the screen in such a way as to be either incomprehensible (like in this film) or heavy-handed (the white-horse stuff in Halloween 2). I don't hate him, because his heart is definitely in the right place, but this movie really is THAT bad.

[MouthForWar]

I WARNED YOU. DIDN'T I WARN YOU?

[jellydonut25]