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60If your expectations aren't too high, there's lots of cool shit on-screen.
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60A cobwebbed, mummified horror entry that makes obvious, cartoonishly grotesque demands for attention.
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50Zombie's sense of fun gets buried under the growing pile of bodies, and eventually, we're left with little more than a frenzy of sadism.
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50Shock-rocker Rob Zombie's loving homage to flat-out nasty horror films of the 1970s will leave many post-"Scream" (1996) horror fans cold because of what it's not. It's not slick or glossy. It's not funny or self-referential.
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50Isn't coherent, exactly, but what dripping-ghoul horror movie is these days? The new rule is, It's not hip to make sense when you're raising hell.
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50As much as film buffs might enjoy recognizing references to "Motel Hell" and other drive-in classics, Mr. Zombie's encyclopedic approach to the genre results in a crowded, frenzied film in which no single idea is developed to a satisfying payoff.
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40The setup almost needs footnotes, which makes it all the more puzzling that Zombie's obvious love for horror's past would translate into such a joyless, grisly rehashing.
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40The endless gore and violence make the experience torturous -- and not just for the victims in the movie.
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38Zombie's film plays more like an experimental pastiche than an outright homage to those classic road-trip-gone-wrong movies.
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30Zombie wants his film to be gleefully demented, but he fails to grasp that loud, inbred evil people torturing stupid, grating benign people isn’t disturbing as much as tedious.
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Straining to put his own stamp on this stale-from-the-crypt material, Zombie falls back on the twitchy visual grammar of his videos, splicing in dream sequences and grainy porno-snippets apparently purchased at Bob Crane's estate sale. The violence eventually becomes more inhuman than human.
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25Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.
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12Kicks off as a cheap piece of retro schlock and quickly devolves into a putrid bloodbath with a thin narrative made utterly indecipherable by the first-time director's clueless approach to filmmaking.
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11The film is a mess, going all over the graveyard but never finding the grave. It's the work of a fan with too much time (and money) on his hands, eagerly awaited but best forgotten.
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10Rips off so many splatter movie tricks at once that it becomes totally frustrating.