I'll get this out of the way, I like Rob Zombie's creative output. Whether it's his music or films. I own most of the White Zombie and his solo catalog on CD. Sitting in my film collection are HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. While I think that a remake of HALLOWEEN was completely unnecessary, I did enjoy the two films Zombie made about the unstoppable force that is Michael Meyers.
31 is a crowd funded film, handled through the web site Fanbacked. Why Zombie chose to go the route of asking his fans for funds is lost on me especially considering the end product. More on that in a moment. Maybe I was out of the loop but looking back I'd have expected to have heard more about the campaign. It wasn't until I saw the film as an upcoming release in my Netflix queue that I knew 31 was in the can and being released.
Halloween, 1976. A group of carnival workers is traveling down a dusty highway in a class C motorhome to their next gig. Trading barbs, jive talking, cracking wise and coming up with the next great carny con are all the ways screenwriter Zombie tries to flesh out the characters prior to the inevitable meeting with evil face to face and being murdered one by one. The carnies are ambushed on the road and those that survive the encounter are taken to an abandoned industrial park. There they are given a number and instructed on how to play the game 31. A game where they must survive being stalked by 'heads'. Heads are a motley group of clown garb wearing maniacs out for blood. Overseeing the madness is Father Napoleon Horatio Silas Murder (!) and his two companions Sister Serpent and Sister Dragon who bet amongst themselves on who will survive. Curiously, the three are dressed up like they wandered over from the set of a PBS show about pre-revolution French royalty.
The film boils down to the good guys running around darkened corridors with leaking pipes. Over and over we watch the dwindling group run here and there (and yes, they do split up from one another) trying to escape the heads.
The film was crowd funded so that we could have yet another film with human monsters chasing people? I was expecting a film unique enough, different enough and so far out there that no studio would fund it and that's why Zombie turned to his fans for help. Instead I watched a film with the same plot, the same scares, and the same twists as scores of slashers I've seen since I started watching slashers some thirty odd years ago. Was Zombie's point in making a film homage to the genre to make it indistinguishable from the hundreds of films that make up the genre? If so, Zombie is far more cunning than I. I just didn't get it.
There are a couple of things I like about 31.
The gore. There's plenty of it. Zombie does not skimp on the practical FX.
The cast. I got a kick out of who Zombie cast in the film. Call me old, or blinded by nostalgia but I really like spotting actors that I grew up watching in a Zombie film. 31 features Malcolm McDowell, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (if you haven't seen COOLEY HIGH remedy it immediately), Judy Geeson, Elizabeth Daily (looking just as hot as she did in VALLEY GIRL), Tracey Walter and Ginger Lynn. The stand out performer is Meg Foster. She looks and acts like a bad ass mama grizzly and I was rooting for her the entire time.
31 is passable, not a bad way to spend with a few beers.
** out of ****
Official site
31 on Fanbacked
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