SXSW 2013 Review: The Lords Of Salem
It’s been awhile since I have seen a truly atrocious movie. One of those films where you can’t tell whether you should pity or punch the people responsible. One where your only real choice is to walk out or just start laughing. Experiencing a film like this is like staring death in the face, either you give in to the hilarity of the unrelenting awfulness and your inability to change its course or go mad. These experiences are important. They harden you. They prepare you for the worst life has to offer. For this, I’d like to thank Rob Zombie.
Zombie’s latest, The Lords Of Salem, is truly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I spent half the film confused and enraged. Utterly unable to comprehend a world where someone could present this to an audience with a straight face. Eventually my resistance was quelled. The act of giving up and giving in was a physical one. A slow deflation as my previous view of the world was washed away by the slow tide of Zombie’s juvenile vision. By the end of the film I had almost entered a state of euphoric delirium. A constant slow chuckle. A chuckle turned into a full gut laugh by the perfect punchline, “Written and Directed by Rob Zombie”. Then the lights came up, the real world came rushing back in, and I looked back on what had occurred with a newfound clarity. I stopped laughing. Perhaps forever.
The Lords Of Salem tells the tale of a radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, who is the descendant of Salem witch hunter John Hawthorne. One day she receives a mysterious LP from a band called The Lords. The record is just a simple set of notes repeated indefinitely but it has the power to awaken an ancient witch coven who then targets Heidi and tries to make her the vessel through with Satan will be reborn. Or something. It doesn’t matter.
The Lords Of Salem is just an excuse for Zombie to indulge in all of his worst tendencies. To open his junior high notebook and use his margin scribblings as storyboards. And of course to show his wife in various states of undress. One scene even has he waking up a couch with her shorts pulled down just enough to expose her ass. She stands up and pulls them up as she walks away from the camera. I just love the idea of Zombie composing the shot and feeling like something just wasn’t right before having a eureka moment before yelling, “Sheri, pull your pants down a bit. This is important…. Perfect!”
He fills the film with ridiculous “evil” imagery, but it’s a Halloween shop version of evil. It’s evil as envisioned by children, while the adults are having a laugh. That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, and Zombie himself has used that to great effect in his music career and first couple of films. It can be fun when you know its being presented in a playful manner. The trouble with Lords of Salem is that it is dead serious. It presents everything with an air of import. It’s meant to be a slow and unsettling build of tension before unleashing true hell at the end. You’re meant to be disturbed.
Zombie even goes so far as to blatantly mimic the style of some of the few directors who genuinely had the ability to disturb, namely Stanley Kubrick and Alejandro Jodorowsky. The films climax is stylistically beholden to those influences but only manages to understand the aesthetic, and not what really made them effective. So by the time you’re watching Sheri Moon ride a goat like an electric bull in slow motion or watching masked nuns stroke their bloody erect penises or seeing a hilarious and weirdly adorable tumor baby waddle around in a cheap costume you aren’t disturbed at all. You just have to laugh. Which the audience did… a lot. One of the only enjoyable aspects of Lords of Salem was witnessing the slow build of incredulousness in the crowd. Seeing the eyes dart around that said, “This is ridiculous, right? You guys see that, right? Should we be laughing? Yeah… I’m laughing.” It built slow and climaxed with the truly stupid final images followed by that Rob Zombie credit.
It’s unfortunate, because Zombie is a truly capable director that has the capacity for some striking visuals. He’s just undone by his horrible taste. The Lords Of Salem is the film that finally killed my hope that he would one day make something great.
