31 – Review
At this point, I’m pretty sure The Devil’s Rejects was a complete fluke.
31 is the newest flick from rockstar turned film auteur, Rob Zombie. The “plot” concerns a group of annoying characters with no redeeming qualities being forced to play a murderous game run by some old people in powder make up and wigs where the group has to survive 12 hours in a compound while being hunted by murderous clowns.
If that sounds like something you may be interested in, then you’re not alone. I was pretty pumped up for this even though his last movie didn’t do much for me. I’m sorry Lords of Salem. It’s not you, it’s me Actually, you know what? It is you The Lords of Salem. You were a bad movie. The trailer for this looked like it was going to be a good time. At the very least, a better time than The Lords of Salem.
All of the pre-requisite items that you’ve come to look forward to in a Rob Zombie movie are in 31:
- His wife.
- Rednecks
- Super 8mm footage interspersed throughout the movie
- His wife in skimpy clothes
- Ginger Lynn’s tits
- His wife being overtly sexual in skimpy clothes
- 1970’s music
- Dialogue that wants to sound more badass than it actually is
- His wife overacting in skimpy clothes
- Clowns
Even with all of those things being included, 31 just can’t get past the feeling that Rob Zombie watched The Running Man and decided it would be more badass if clowns with chainsaws, his terrible wife, and Malcolm McDowell in a powdered wig were the stars.
This looks cool as a drawing. It’s much less cool in real life.
Unfortunately for the audience, this is not the case. He so wants us to take this movie seriously but then puts in a ridiculous sex scene set to the movie Nosferatu or has a dwarf Nazi yell at us in Spanish while wearing a giant bunny head. It’s terrible.
The main cast is terrible, the dialogue is full of cringy lines, and the story is a mishmash of other better movies that never fully comes together. As I said earlier, it feels like a 14 year old saw The Running Man, decided to re-write it to be more metal, got bored half way through the script and stuck it in desk drawer where it sat for 25 years until Rob Zombie found it and added Nazi clowns and his wife.
The best thing about the movie is Richard Brake as Doom-Head but unfortunately, he wasn’t in the movie all that much. In fact, there were times where I thought he’d be an amazing take on the Joker when DC reboots the character for the millionth time in the future.
It’s a bit sad but one of my favorite parts of the movie is how he gets his make-up ready for his “performance”. He brought an air of gravitas with him when he was on screen, that is when Rob Zombie would just let the character breathe. However, he was also in that terrible sex scene I mentioned that completely undermined the character and felt totally out of place and was a repeat of the sex scene from The Devil’s Rejects. At least Ginger Lynn is still getting work. She was completely underrated in Wing Commander 3.
I now believe that The Devil’s Rejects was a fluke and that was the best thing he’ll ever be a part of that’s not called White Zombie.
