After spending most of this week in the company of Rob Zombies ‘Firefly’ trilogy, there was one question that I had burning in the back of my brain. ‘If ‘The Devils Rejects’ was so enjoyable, and ‘3 From Hell’ was so boring and generic. Was Zombies earlier direction a fluke? Or was there a definitive decline in quality? Well; I found out today that ‘Tubi’ had Zombies next ‘original’ production after his somewhat disasterous attempts at ‘Halloween’ remakes. So I figured, while im in Zombie country, why not finish off his straight horror releases…And I think its been a LONG time since i’ve been quite so dissapointed by a production.

The plot takes place over a week and follows Heidi, a local celebrity DJ and a third of Salems number 1 radio team for the area. They’re your typical, slightly obnoxious Radio hosts. But they’re open to exploring and spolighting talent, on a segment of their show they call ‘Smash or Trash’ The idea is simple enough, Heidi and co source some local bands, play there music and get people to call in calling ‘Smash’ or ‘Trash’ and if its a ‘smash’ they get more airtime and possibly an interview at the station.

Heidi and her Co-host ‘Whitey’ are responsible for picking the titles, and while finishing up the show on monday night, Heidi recieves a mysterious package, a record sealed in a hand carved wooden box, addressed to her birth name, rather than her celebrity name. Weirded out, Heidi takes it home with Whitey and the pair decide to give the record a spin. Heidi is disturbed by the music, but Whitey thinks it would be a great idea to include it in their ‘Smash’ segment, so the next night, while on the air with an expert historian on Witchcraft in Salem, the pair play the record and…strange things begin to happen.

While nothing immediate, Heidi slowly begins to become more and more unwell, the historian asks the name of the artist, only to be told its from a band called ‘The Lords’ which the hosts have instead decided to rename ‘The Lords of Salem’. And what follows is Heidi slowly falling down a surreal and strange rabbit hole into covens, witchcraft and other unusualities. While her friends around her and the historian desperately try to figure out whats happening to their friend, and more about ‘The Lords’.

And the thing is, the way this is pitched on most ‘Bio’ synopsis sites and even on the back of the box for the DVD and bluray version is ‘Local DJ gets sent a mysterious record in the mail, decides to play it on her show and accidentally awakens a coven of pissed off witches who want her dead.’ And, to me? that sounded amazing! A kind of intersect horror thriller marrying up elements of ‘Halloween 3’ and ‘It Follows’ with our DJ having to essentially go into hiding and try to find ‘The Lords’ to figure out why a load of pissed off witches want her dead now. That sounded ace!

This film however, is not. This film is Rob Zombie once again doing his ‘Big Brain’/ ‘Im SO into Horror films, LET ME SHOW YOU’ crud again. Essentially this film is a kind of reimagining/grungey reinterpretation of George Romeros ‘Season of the Witch’ but with a hardy helping of Andrzej Żuławski’s ‘Possession’ heaped in for good measure. But both feel distinctly ‘Dollar Tree-Ized’. Oh! and the 3rd act, bizarrely suddenly shifts into ‘Lair of the white worm’ terratory…I guess Zombie changed channels half way through one of his movie marathons.

The script is slow burn to the point of being immobile. A not insignificant chunk of this film is just Heidi wandering around her apartment, wandering around the town, or walking to and from work learning French. With the rest of the film essentially boiling down to just characters info dumping in very abstract and ‘spiritual’ style dialogue.

All the things I like in this film, are essentially ‘liberated’ from the films i’ve mentioned above, and whats left is an INCREDIBLY derivative film that feels like someone dumped a DVD collection into a blender and hit go. Its so bad on that front that I honestly dont know whats original film making on Zombies part, and whats just something from a horror film I havent seen thoroughly.

The tone of the film is at least somewhat consistently dark, with horror and shock being the main elements being worked on here, I did quite like the occasional peppering of lightness here, it made a contrast that I feel did help lift the production ultimately. Even if it’s ‘lifting’ was from ‘Bad’ to ‘Meh’.

I think the biggest flaw this script has (apart from the endless references to other movies) is just that the characters arnt particularly well balanced. We spend the vast majority of the film with Heidi. But as a character we dont really learn a lot about her. In fact, the film is kind of haphazard with her as a character at times making it even harder to really get a feel for exactly who she is and what her motivations are across the runtime.

A good example of that being that around the end of the first act, they just randomly drop in that Heidi is a recovering Drug addict…nothing leading up to that reveal would give any indication that the character was a drug addict…And once that ‘recovery meeting’ scene is over, we dont really hear anything about that piece of information till the end of the film when (mild spoilers that arnt really spoilers here) she has a relapse.

In fact, that was something that particularly annoyed me about this film (skip the next couple paragraphs if you dont want 3rd act spoilers). At first I thought they were going to try and play with the idea of ‘Is there an ACTUAL coven of witches trying to use Heidi as a vessle for the rebirthing of the antichrist, or is this going to flip things on its head and play around with the idea that Heidi is just an exhausted, stressed DJ dealing with a lot in the work AND home life who’s dealing with all the symptoms of withdrawal, and, on relapsing accepts her fate and ‘makes a deal with the devil’ metaphorically…

But then as the credits rolled on the film, they have a radio announcer overdub state ‘Nah, she actually WAS kidnapped and mind controlled by witches in order to rebirth the antichrist, shes ascended into hell now and 32 women committed suicide to make it happen.’ and I just felt the most pained feeling as an audience member because they had ONE good thing going for this film, the fact it could be read in two ways…But they just HAD to clarify ‘No shes the mother of the antichrist, BYE GUYS!!!’…*Sigh*

She gets a bit of a bad hand in terms of character development and actually giving us something to feel about her. But the supporting cast get an even more raw deal. Her co-hosts, who are basically supposed to be the supporting cast for this movie get a meaty 20 minutes or so across the first act, and the first half of the second act…And then they just dissapear for a HUGE chunk of the movie until near enough the end. I dont know why Ken Foree is in this movie as ‘Herman’. Other than cracking a few jokes on the show, he LITERALLY does nothing to impact the plot of this film in any way…Its wild they actually put a notable name from horror in this role because he does NOTHING. Hell…at least Petricia Quinn got a couple of moody ‘palm reader’ moments here to be fun.

Whitey is supposed to be Heidis on/off love interest here, but after the first act he basically vanishes other than a few moments at work and a couple of phone calls. I dont know anything about him, Herman OR any of the coven who appear in this movie. I know more about the Historian guest visitor and the strange heavy metal artist whos only in the film for 5 minutes, than I do about Heidis co-hosts who are supposed to be main players here…and THAT. is a problem.

Add to that, that the film itself is WAY overlong at an hour and 40 (this should have been sub 90 minutes, and EASILY could have been 70-80) and the result is a script that feels largely cribbed, with anything not borrowed badly crammed into place.

The direction kind of goes that way too, expect references within the cinematogrpahy from everything from ‘Silent Night Deadly Night 4’ to ‘Carnival of Souls’ to ‘Fire walk with me’ across the runtime. Honestly I was kind of amazed at just how much of it was visually borrowed from other films. We once again have Zombie flashing up footage from old 40s public domain flicks, it feels even MORE out of place here than it has done in all his previous movies…Once again, its derivative. with even the grander more interesting creative cinematography choices being ‘half inched’ from films like ‘Cinema Paradiso’ and ‘Dantes inferno’.

Well, Does he handle what he’s showing well? NO! because the problem is, this is all stuff borrowed from other movies and squeezed into his mould. The issue being that he’s shooting ‘because it looks cool’ rather than understanding exactly WHY the shots were shot like that in their respective original movies, quite a few shots here, had visual MEANING in the films they were taken from. it was supposed to give a visual subconcious ‘tell’ to the audience about something going on on screen. But here? Zombies just used it because it looks cool in the moment, and the result is a hollow offering for the most part, with only one or two scenes actually feeling the weight of what they’re showing.

To which end, the cine is ultimately passable, its a dingey seedy looking picture, but its kind of aiming for that, so In that regard it does well, the film does manage to balance a sense of grandness against the more ‘micro’ world that Heidi is slowly being boxed into. But its all a bit ‘by the numbers’ with the only standout shots being the aforementioned ‘lifted’ bits. The edit too kind of suffers a bit because of that, as you suddenly find yourself trying to accomodate random shot types into the scene structuring when it really doesnt work with the visual story telling at play.

Performance wise? This is essentially a character piece for Sheri Moon Zombie…and, I dont want to come across as too harsh here, but she really just, isnt the right type of actress for this kind of production. Rob Zombie clearly loves her (or, at the very least he loves her ass as its shown approximately 200 times in this movie AND in every other movie hes ever made) but I feel very much like this was a miscast. Sheri struggles with nuance. subtle micro movements within the performance that give the audience a better idea whats going on in her head. She can do extremes relatively well, but she cant work a spectrum. She can do ‘explosive’ anger, or inconsolable sadness. But ask her to dial down from there to ANY level, and it quickly becomes sub ‘The Asylum’ level fodder.

Heidi as a role required someone who could work with subtleties and give a full range of emotions across the spectrum to the part, its not enough to just get blunt melee’d with extreme emotions…Not helped either by the fact she just simply cant play genuine shock. she can do ‘Oh my god!’ shocked. But ‘head empty’/’jaw dropped’/’lost for words’ shock is something she just cannot physically show, and this film needed that range a good half a dozen times across the runtime. She just doesnt have it, she has moments where shes good! but the vast majority of the time I just really wished they’d given this role to someone able to work with and balance contrasts.

As for the rest of the cast, its a pretty open and shut case. Bruce Davison, Judy Geeson and Patricia Quinn are all great as the historian and Heidis landlords ‘Lacy’ and ‘Megan’…I just wish we got to spend a bit more time with those characters to really get under their skin, instead of being stuck with them strictly in a ‘need to know’ basis.

I dont know why they even bothered having Ken Foree and Jeff Daniel Phillips in this, Its like when Zombie started working on the script he really built them into be main players…But by the 2nd act he forgot they existed and had to hastily pick them back up in the finale. They’re totally unmemorable and get almost nothing to do in this film.

Probably the strangest performance goes to Meg Foster as Margaret Morgan, the head of the coven. Fosters performance is absolutely fine, SOLID even, i’d say shes one of the better parts of the film! But they underuse her to the point that when she does turn up, it takes you a moment to remember who she even really was, and given they do take some time to make her out to be a terrible horror from realms unknown…she basically just shuffles and cackles a bit…ocassionally she messes around with guts and gets naked… and then vanishes. I kind of wish there was more to her than that…but that was about it.

And finally, the soundtrack? drone mainly…mainly drone…a handful of jukebox tracks help give this something approaching a character…But its not enough honestly…

I think there is absolutely a great idea for a low budget indie film in here somewhere. the pitch that does the rounds online is the barest of bones to this film and I feel if it were to be reimagined, with a creative talent behind the wheel, this could be a pretty rock solid picture…Unfortunately we got Rob Zombie. and the results are a movie once again trying its best to tell the audience how much Zombie loves ‘The Incredible melting man’ and the works of ‘Ken Russell’ and does very VERY little with the original scraps presented here.

If nothing else, this film inspired me to want to go make a much better movie than this. So in that regards I have to be grateful. But I probably wont watch this one again, I absolutely cant recommend it. and I really really hope Zombie manages to get some new movies in his collection soon, because the well he’s mining from is running DRY.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-lords-of-salem/