The Lords of Suck: Or How I Learned To Stop Watching and Walk Out of the Theater

I've never walked out of a movie before. Seriously, not once. Not during The Covenant, not during The Chronicles of Riddick, not even during Master of Disguise. Some of the bad movies I've seen, like The Covenant, are at least fun to make fun of. Plus, each movie had their redeeming qualities. And you've read on this blog before that I consider several movies to be underrated that others would write off immediately. At the very least, I consider them worthy of examination, if only to find out what went wrong.

Picture unrelated.

I'm not sure anything went wrong with Lords of Salem, the newest film by Rob Zombie. I'm sure everything went exactly according to the way he wanted it to go. But that's the biggest problem. And that's why I walked out.

THIS SUMMER...The Hamburglar has had ENOUGH

I was, however, seeing it to support a friend's friend, so I went back in for the ending, which was more entertaining than the rest of the movie. But Lords of Salem feels like two “Satanic” wannabe high school metalheads were sitting down in their parent's basement and having a writing competition and saying things to each other like, “OH YEAH, WELL THEN I'M GONNA HAVE A BABY NAILED TO A CROSS, THAT'S SO DARK” and “YEAH, WELL I'M GONNA HAVE HER GIVE THE PRIEST A BLOW-JOB, YEAH, UHN FUCK SO METAL”. Note: both of these actually happened in the movie.

Make no mistake, Lords of Salem is a level of fucked-up that is very rare. It markets itself as “surreal horror”, presenting itself as a successor to Rosemary's Baby. But to me, anything "surreal" has to get inside your head, it has to make you think that you're someplace where rules and logic have left you. In surreal horror specifically, rules and logic flee to leave you utterly at the mercy of nameless, formless, unknowable things that hunger for your very sanity and being. The key there is that surreal horror has to give the impression that you have been ABANDONED by rules and logic, not just that they were never there in the first place. 

The thing that makes Rosemary's Baby scary in its surreality is that the weird things come in slowly, deliberately. Even when they're in concentrated doses they always HINT at something even more sinister beneath the surface, and are otherwise diffused throughout the movie in a simmering atmosphere of dread. If Rosemary's Baby had a simmering atmosphere, Lords of Salem's atmosphere is boiling over in the pot while a toddler bangs a frying pan with a wooden spoon right next to it, and “hint” did not seem to be in its vocabulary. There's nothing beneath the surface of its weirdness. To me, sitting as my eyeballs and earballs got assaulted with as many weird images as can fit in 24 frames per second, The Lords of Salem didn't scare me. It wasn't horror. It was noise.

And that's the problem. Lords of Salem never actually got inside my head. It stepped on the gas full-speed from the very beginning. There was very little progression up to the weird stuff. If you're going to do something surreal, you absolutely need to ground the film first, to establish the “normal” world so that your audience knows exactly what rules are going to be completely tossed out the window.

Instead, the very first scene is a weird, awkward witchcraft ceremony with blood and naked old ladies and a goat. It's like Lords of Salem didn't trust its first 15 minutes in the modern setting (and in fairness, it shouldn't have), and decided they needed to fuck the audience in the eyes right away with a preview of the craziness to come. But throughout the rest of the movie, at least until the ending, the craziness and surreality comes in stabs. There's no build-up, it's just suddenly, WHOA THERE'S A GHOST LADY IN THE KITCHEN, or WHOA NOW WE'RE BACK IN SALEM FOR A WITCH BURNING. The instances of craziness were so sudden as to be fucking hilarious, especially the numerous appearances of the ghost-lady, who does nothing more than stand there like a shy, well-meaning caretaker.

“Now John,” you might say, “Rob Zombie's movies are supposed to be fucked-up. You're supposed to cringe, and throw up in your mouth, and cover your eyes.” Well, yes. I certainly did all of that. And reacting the way I did to Lords of Salem made me feel a bit like an old fuddy-duddy, like a soccer mom disapproving of violent video games. But the thing is, I love fucked-up stuff. And all varieties of fucked-up: The Shining and Rosemary's Baby are my two favorite horror movies. I absolutely love Neon Genesis Evangelion and the movie conclusion End of Evangelion. You wanna talk about fucked-up movies...we got nothing on the Japanese. I love the original version of The Prisoner, which is fucked-up in more of an acid-trip way, but it sure as hell gets inside your head. It makes you uncomfortable and paranoid, and it didn't need any babies on crosses to do it like Lords of Salem.

To be fair, I actually knew what was going on in the ending to Lords of Salem.

The difference, I believe, is that I actually care about the characters in all those things. Rosemary is a completely sympathetic character and we learn in the first 15 minutes of the movie why we should care about her: her love for her husband, their desire for a child, their money troubles. With that bond established, it makes the rest of the movie more heart-wrenching as her paranoia slowly grows and the weird gets turned up to 11. End of Evangelion is so emotionally draining and horrifying because we've been with these characters and watched them reveal their innermost traumas for the entire series, and in the movie we finally see them pushed to their breaking point.

I mentioned the first 15 minutes of Lords of Salem. In it, besides the aforementioned witchcraft ceremony, we are introduced to the main character, played by Rob Zombie's wife (which should tell you something right there). I use “introduced” loosely, in that she is displayed on screen, and does things. But by the end of the first 15 minutes, I knew nothing about her motivations or personality beyond, 1. She has a dog, 2. She pets that dog, 3. Her apartment is unrealistically sized to fit in the house in the exterior shots, and 4. She works as a DJ. I was bored already, because rather than show her talking with people about her life, or actually playing with the dog, or SOMETHING, we see her get up, put on her glasses, go into the kitchen, eat, pee, and FUCK it went on forever. I wanted to actually know who the hell she was, and why the audience should care.

Then I regretted that, because she turns out to be a supremely annoying radio DJ. When she giggled and told her co-worker unironically, “Don't be jelly!” (as in “jealous”) it sealed her fate in my mind. The other two hosts are played sympathetically enough, and I had no problems with their characters, although everyone in the radio station seems to be both 8 years old and have some kind of weaponized ADHD that scientists in our world have yet to discover.

WM-ADHD's?

“Don't be jelly” should tell you what kind of writing to expect, and some of it was not bad, per se, but weirdly phrased. I think it was supposed to add to the surreality, but for me it just stuck out more. What's weird is that Rob Zombie's writing and approach to filmmaking seems to be very schizophrenic in this movie. He seems to go balls-to-the-wall one minute, then almost sedately restrained the next. Dialogue will be laughably on-the-nose one minute, then so vague that you're not actually sure what it meant.

I think that's the core problem I had with this movie: Rob Zombie thinks that messing with peoples' heads means giving them a headache, hence the jarring tonal shifts and assault of imagery. But once he fucking settles down on a tone, sometimes it's really enjoyable. I found the final acid trip at the ending to be fairly inspired madness, because the movie finally took its Ritalin and calmed down long enough to commit to something. But then it's off again to just throwing crazy shit on the screen like a baby flinging birthday cake to see if anything will stick.

It felt juvenile to me. That's the best way I can sum it up. And not juvenile in a fun or cheeky way, but juvenile in a desperate attention-seeking way. And instead of being disturbing, it was just perturbing. Believe me, I love a good mind-fuck, but while something like The Prisoner fucks my mind with confidence like a well-hung, virile stud, Lords of Salem fucks my mind like an annoying frat boy with whiskey dick who won't take no for an answer.

The Prisoner? More like The HUNK. Have I mentioned I am heterosexual today?