3 FROM HELL : A Legacy Of Snores

This year has been flooded with the discourse of violent individuals from the underlying shadows of Charles Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to the mounting societal disillusionment leading to an eruption of killing by Arthur Fleck in Todd Phillips’ gritty take on Joker. Not coincidentally, these films weave the violent themes of their narratives around news clips, newspaper headlines, journalists, reporters, and the entertainment industry.

The Devil’s Rejects (Again)

The Firefly family, the band of snarky and satanic serial killers in 3 From Hell, are Rob Zombie’s attempt at an interpretation of the inhuman, the otherworldly, and the transcendent nature of celebrity that is cultivated and propagated through media and myth to try and make sense of the savageness of their violence. The issue with Zombie’s trilogy, however, is that the movies themselves become the machine that tries to build the myth. Through very obvious stylistic choices, the Fireflys are treated, at least in The Devil’s Rejects and 3 From Hell, as extremely charismatic and self-assured anti-heroes. As something greater and prouder and more powerful than the average human they contend with. In reality, they are some of the flimsiest and uninteresting horror movie killers in American cinema history.

In the latest and supposedly final installment (though the ending is never definitive) of the trilogy, not much has changed in personality and style with the Fireflys. 3 From Hell is much more a retread of The Devil’s Rejects than one would hope, bringing back nearly the same grab-bag of horror and action plot-points as the last movie – kidnappings, guts and blood, innocent people dying, over-confident cops being duped like idiots at every turn, and the mind-numbingly verbose vernacular of Otis (Bill Mosely) and Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie).

Not much has changed or improved in Rob Zombie’s craft as a writer and filmmaker either. Conversations ramble along with meaningless platitudes. Everyone’s gotta have a thumping one-liner that that tries to one-up the next person and it quickly becomes a tiresome and monotonous exercise in hollow bragging. Whenever Otis slams his hands on a table and yells something like “Don’t tell me what’s impossible motherf*cker, I am the impossible,” my eyes rolled back into my head. Throughout The Devil’s Rejects, I thought maybe this nonsense was an ironic way of dispelling serial killers as unimaginative and jejune, but after 3 From Hell, I’m starting to think Zombie actually thinks his dialogue is captivating.

A Requiem for Captain Spalding

The only person in the entire Firefly trilogy who can somehow manage to make Zombie’s dialogue work is the late Sid Haig, who’s performance as the crazed clown Captain Spalding is good for some adrenaline in a series of films largely bereft of fun energy. It comes as a major disappointment honestly that while the first fifteen or so minutes of House of 1,000 Corpses feature Haig’s Spalding as the prominent figure, the rest of the movie and series relegates him behind the annoying and bland Otis and Baby. In 3 From Hell, he registers barely thirty seconds and his character is killed off early – a plotting change Zombie was forced to make after being informed of Haig’s deteriorating health.

If 3 From Hell fails beyond just its contents as a movie, it really lets go of the rope with bothering to introduce someone as energetic and magnanimous in personality as Spalding. The replacement is Foxy, Otis and Baby’s half-brother, played by Richard Brake who emotes as much emotional range and offers as much meaningful dialogue as in his more famous role as the Night King in Game of Thrones. He joins Otis and Baby in their kidnapping and slow taunting and eventual murder of the jail wardens who were keeping them behind bars. They then travel to Mexico where they re-encounter Rondo (Danny Trejo) from The Devil’s Rejects who is still bent on killing them.

The Intrigue Has Vanished

By the time 3 From Hell winds to its conclusion, the little voice in my mind whispering “who cares” was a loud pleading yelp. It made me think of how much the Fireflies actually seemed like an interesting bunch of crazies in House of 1,000 Corpses, clearly inspired by Leatherface’s wacky sadistic family members from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Zombie’s biggest influences come from both 70’s slasher horror and Marx Brothers comedies, and it’s a concoction that one can imagine working. But Zombie became enamored with the Firefly family as a legend, a legacy of killers in line with Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and others who have been elevated to iconic status.

This past year Ted Bundy’s legacy was shoved back into the faces of the American people through Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, a documentary series recounting Bundy’s murders and trial through archival footage of his own conversations with journalists, and the fictional film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile both directed by Joe Berlinger. His resurgence in the pop culture consciousness gave way to discourse on how infamous killers become mythical in American media. Zombie had the chance to take this on in 3 From Hell, but it seems he values the Fireflys more as flatly straightforward screen icons than as ciphers for any introspection on media and violence.

While House of 1,000 Corpses utilized the elements of wayward teens being caught in a spider’s web that slasher cinema, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13^th, relied on and kept its antagonists under a shroud of satanic mysticism, the latter two offerings in Zombie’s series turned them into routine serial killers who just like to hear themselves talk. In 3 From Hell, we get reporters and anchormen commenting on their legacy, we get protestors who align with their rebellion against the “system”, but no amount of freeze-frames on Baby laughing maniacally, or Otis one-liners can elevate the legacy of the Fireflys from being anything more than a headache.

3 from Hell was released on October 14th, 2019.