This thing has sat unwritten for a while - it seems stupid to write about cult movies when such large and devastating issues are unfolding outside the House of Sparrows. But the House is safe on lockdown, well-resourced and comfortable, if cluttered. And one of life's deepest challenges is that it doesn't stop - we don't cease to be ourselves or lose our interests just because we're under quarantine.
Upping the internet bandwidth and speed on this end has been an absolute godsend, making for better newsgathering and vastly improved viewing options. Loath as I've been to dive into the whole streaming sphere the distraction has been more than welcome, and it's been good to finally catch up with things that had eluded me previously. (Indeed, in honor of Walpurgis Night, I think tonight is the night I finally take in Sarah Phelps' adaptation of Christie's The Pale Horse.) And it's been a pleasant surprise to find that the internet doesn't necessarily inhibit spontaneity (serendipity, even), that streaming movies occasionally co-mingle with the artful clarity of in-cinema double features. Two movies taken in on different platforms within 24 hours of one another had a lot to say to me, and each other.
Horror filmmaker and musician Rob Zombie would have been around ten when Race With The Devil was released, and it's very easy to imagine the mid-1970s monster kid Zombie must have been seeing it multiple times. I hadn't intended to follow Race with a thematically similar motion picture, but Zombie's indie horror opus 31 would sit very comfortably beneath Race on a double bill, taking in as it does the story of a group of clowns who pile in a van and head off on a road trip only to run afoul of an oddly-aristocratic cabal who force them into a violent game with death as the stakes. (Sealing its kinship with the prior movie, the movie takes place on Halloween, 1976.)
31 clinched my suspicions that there are two Rob Zombies - a consistent-but-unimaginative writer and more-than-competent director - vying for supremacy of his brain, never mind his films. The story is a rote re-hash of The Most Dangerous Game that teases but doesn't pursue an obvious line of class-consciousness. But it's beautifully executed on a largely crowd-funded budget, unfolding in a palpably grimy setting shot through with moody atmosphere and striking use of color. There's always something to look at, and the textures of skin, wood, fog give it a tangibility that makes for effective horror (cinematographer David Daniels takes over for longtime Zombie shooter Brandon Trost and proves just as adept in making Zombie's outre world look and feel real.)
Most of the characters of 31 speak in the same colorful yet witless white trash patois that Zombie has been putting in the mouths of 85% of his characters since House of 1000 Corpses, and most of the villains stalking them through the movie's lethal factory maze match the cheerful vulgarity of the protagonists with a similarly Southern-fried sadism. The cast uniformly commit to and sell their dialogue - as limited as Zombie's scripts often are I can't recall an actor who did anything less than demanded of them. Many horror filmmakers have either a strong visual sense or a sure hand with actors, but Zombie has both, and I suspect that many actors who continue to work for Zombie genuinely enjoy doing so. (The most striking figure is cut by Richard Brake as nominal-lead heavy Doomhead, who brings such terrifying and charismatic intensity to his monologues that I wished they'd been written by almost anybody else.)
This double-feature of not great movies took the edge off a couple of quarantine days, and offered a welcome reminder that cinema remains a living, breathing thing. An actor's medium that presents you new work by old favorites and introduces new favorites in even less-than-auspicious settings (I'd pay real money to see Richard Brake's MacBeth). A venue for ever-new, visceral thrills. A companion and friend even, especially, in times like these. As my new favorite channel says so charmingly, stay home/stay alive, friend.
