Originally Posted by
El Ahrairah
I got your back on this one Mike... You can sit back, relax, and watch a shitty Knicks, Nets, Mets, Yankees or Giants game.
I think his minuses are WAY more prevalent and numerous than you're making them out to be and his positives are few and far between.
His "cinematography" style, is 1990s MTV music video. He has moved on a bit from this, but its seen throughout most of his library. Of course this is the case because his only experience in film making before 1000 was music video's and it definitely shows. What he has adapted to is bland and lacks any kind of creativity, basically it took him a decade of killing movies to reach the point he would have been at had he gone to film school and been a first year writer/director.
Despite his work being very sloppy and an incoherent mess, ironically his best work was 1000 corpses and Rejects. Which i don't think is saying too much.
And now we dive into his writing and i wont even get into how poor his character writing is because i feel youve covered that........The problem with these (the two good movies) and all of his movies, while the first two are decent he very clearly has an idea for a movie and then watches two or three movies to "inspire" him but because hes not a real film maker he simply ends up copying them. You could call 1000 corpses a remake or re-envisioning of Texas. Rejects you could tell he still had the Texas idea, but he must have started watching the late 90s independent thrillers or maybe even From Dusk Til Dawn. The point is, we can really narrow down what he's watching when writing these scripts. In the comedy world, this would be a joke thief. This is not homage to these movies, its straight stealing from them and we see this with all of his movies, including his latest disaster piece "31", which.... wow, oh wow, that redefined bad. These movies end up being like Always Sunny, without the self awareness.
Now of course executives saw this from him which is why they decided to bring him on for remakes/reboots. Ideally he is the perfect guy for horror remakes/reboots. Not very creative, at that point had shown he can put together a semi-coherent movie and his name draws a crowd that are a large percentage of horror movie viewing demographics.
So they go with Halloween, i remember there being rumors about him doing Texas as well, but im not sure what happened to that but i suspect he was dropped because of the bad reception Halloween got.
With Halloween it really made myself and many others, question if he understood the movies at all but more importantly, this should have been the last straw for even those "defending" him as a writer and film maker. It was the apex of everything he does poorly. From the one dimensional, very poorly written characters (and dialog) that do not even feel like real human beings. To the focus on story aspects that should not be focused on. To the lazy and nonsensical attempt at the surreal. And as mentioned before, it was pretty clear he did not understand what made Halloween a great and frightening series, that he only viewed it as a knife wielding killer and he didnt seem to look past that. And anyone who understands these movies (or at least the first two) understood that this is what separated the series from all the other slashers.... these aspects thrown into the movie that even if you were not aware of them, you're brain was and its what made the movies work and its a shame that Zombie ignored his brain.
And all of this is without diving into the possibility that his entire writing/directing career might simply be a ruse to give his failed actress wife, work.
There are bad directors who end up making movies unintentionally. These are typically pretty good because they are so bad. Im not one to say "its bad thus it holds no value or entertainment", some of the best movie watching experiences of my life have been watching shit movies with friends while smoking some greenery. Not to advocate drug use, but this is an experience i feel everyone should live through.
But then there are the bad, bad movies. Movies with a bad director, a bad script, and you generally have a bad time watching it. This has been my and most people i speak with or know (aside from Rob Zombie/White Zombie fans who blindly defend this guy) experience with all but two of his movies.
Im all for differences in what people enjoy, but with Rob Zombie and his movies, 99 out of 100 times someone tries to defend his movies, they seem to be doing so because they enjoy his music and not because they are taking an objective look at the movies themselves.