31
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- Release Date: September 16, 2016
- Directed by: Rob Zombie
- Written by: Rob Zombie
- Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes
Rob Zombie seems to have a sort of divisive response in the horror community. While many horror fans enjoy his movies like House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, a lot of his other movies draw divided reactions from horror fans. I myself am a pretty big fan of his films because I really enjoy the grindhouse-ish aesthetic he uses in them. The film quiality is always so grainy and rough, they have a lot of famous genre actors from decades past, and they're full of enough blood and sleaze to make them stand alongside the old-school exploitation films that he's clearly inspired by. Having had such an awful time working with The Weinstein Company on his two Halloween films, and swearing to never work with a big studio again, 31 was Rob's first movie that he crowdfunded.
The movie follows a group of carnies in the 1970s, who are kidnapped and held hostage in a building where they are forced to play a game of 31. What this means is that they have to survive twelve hours while a group of sadistic, psychopathic clowns hunts them down. While the protagonists have some funny and quotable moments, they aren't all that engaging as characters. Most of them are a little wooden and don't have a lot of depth to them outside of the typical roles that they play. However, the clowns that are hunting them are extremely fun and memorable. You have Sick-Head (the dwarf neo-Nazi), Schizo-Head (the chainsaw-wielder), and a few other bloodthirsty butchers. Easily the best of them all is Doom-Head, played by Richard Brake. This movie solidified him as one of my favorite character actors in horror. His opening monologue is chilling, and his smile is the stuff of nightmares. When he gives you the crazy eyes and smiles to the point where drool is running out of his mouth, you actually feel like he's going to leap out of the screen and cut you up. He gives easily the best performance in the movie, and is easily the most memorable part of it.
All that being said, one glaring issue I have with this movie is its camerawork. All of the action in this movie is shot on a handheld camera. This means a lot of the violent scenes are either cut so quickly that you can't make out exactly what's happening, or shaking around so much that you can't make sense of anything. As someone who followed the production as it was going on, that was pretty disappointing to see. Since this movie was crowdfunded and Rob didn't have to deal with studio censorship, he promoted this movie as the most violent film he had done at that point. When he submitted it to the MPAA for a rating, he had to keep cutting some of the violence until he could finally secure an R rating. While there is a lot of carnage and messed-up moments here, none of the violence comes off as more extreme than his other work because of the cuts. Every time I watch this, I'm just aware that I'm watching a cut film. I remember reading years ago that Rob planned on releasing an uncut version on home media, but all these years later, it has yet to materialize.
31 is a mid-tier movie in Rob Zombie's filmography. On its own, it's not bad if you want an exploitation sleaze-fest. But it never truly reaches the heights of something like The Devil's Rejects or The Lords of Salem for me.