Taylor Hensel

Well, you can't quite capture lightning in the bottle twice, although I'll always respect the effort to try. Rob Zombie's "3 From Hell," the concluding film in Zombie's Firefly Trilogy (at least until he decides to make a fourth one), continues the tonal change from "The Devil's Rejects" and keeps his clan of murderous Texans grounded in reality while fan-favorites Otis, Baby, and new-comer Foxy Coltrane go on yet another depraved blood-soaked road trip after breaking Baby out of jail. The film often feels like a re-tread of "The Devil's Rejects," with its desert vistas and Western-influenced set pieces, but if "Rejects" was more "The Wild Bunch," where the entire film is building toward watching the Fireflys eventually get their comeuppance, then "3 From Hell" is a bizarre, grindhouse take on "The Outlaw Josey Wales," as the homicidal siblings make their way into Mexico where they achieve some...version of redemption? Because Baby wins a knife-throwing contest and befriends a dwarf? I don't know, I've never been sold on Zombie's insistence that this psychotic pack of serial killers and rapists are modern-day outlaw anti-heroes, but the characters are so charismatic and the acting much better than it has any right to be that I don't particularly care. While it's over-the-top as hell, less fun than "Corpses" and less well-crafted than "Rejects," it's still enjoyable no-holds-barred X-treme horror cinema, and one that I don't mind recommending to people who are into that kinda thing.

"The Devil's Rejects," Rob Zombie's 2005 sequel to his 2003 cult hit "House of 1000 Corpses," is superior in every way and still remains the director's best film to date. While "Corpses" is a cartoonish black comedy about pop-culture obsessed redneck serial killers, "Rejects" is a gritty, relentlessly violent Southern-fried ride into hell that is less of a horror film and more of a pitch-black '70s era Western, almost as if Sam Peckinpah was allowed to direct "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2." A blood-soaked revenge film that follows a rural Texas sheriff who happens to be the younger brother of one of the Firefly family's previous victims," "Rejects" wears its influences right on its sleeve without ever becoming truly derivative, and cements itself within the '70s outlaw film tradition with its soundtrack comprised of mainly decade-specific Southern rock. A film that is as much "The Wild Bunch" as it is "The Hills Have Eyes," "The Devil's Rejects" is Wyatt Earp vs. the Manson Family, and if that's not a possibility that you've ever considered, then you probably won't appreciate this film. As for me, it's one of my yearly October go-to's. Highly recommended, if you're into that kind of thing.

A blackly comic hillbilly horror pastiche that's three parts "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and one part "Rocky Horror Picture Show," "House of 1000 Corpses," Zombie's first installment in his Firefly Trilogy, which introduces the eponymous backwoods Texas serial killer family, can't quite figure out what it wants to be, but boy does it have a lot of fun doing the figuring. Not nearly as dark and hyper-violent as its sequels, "Corpses" is an over-the-top, neon-lit Halloween carnival ride that assaults you with depraved characters while making you wince and laugh uncomfortably. While its ridiculously out of place ending completely undermines a lot of what makes a majority of the film enjoyable, "House of 1000 Corpses" is still worth a watch, especially for fans of redneck/grindhouse horror, and one that I'm happy to throw on during the month of October. Not a great film, but certainly not an awful one.