The Lords of Salem (2013)

Title: The Lords of Salem (2013)

Writer/Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Sherri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, Maria Conchita Alonso, Meg Foster

From the very beginning, when I first saw House of a 1000 Corpses (2003), I always thought that Rob Zombie was a horror film director with lots of potential. House of a 1000 Corpses wasn’t a perfect film, but there was something there that screamed "this guy is promising". What gives Zombie the edge that other horror directors don’t have is that he knows horror inside and out; he’s obviously seen thousands of horror films and genuinely loves the genre.  Add to this the fact that he’s directed many of his own music videos and you’ve got a guy with the knowledge and understanding of the horror genre as well as the necessary experience behind the camera to make a decent horror film. He took a stab at making commercially viable horror films with his remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (2007) and followed that one with his own thing called Halloween II (2009), but according to Rob Zombie himself, making these two films wasn’t exactly the happiest of experiences. Working under the yoke of oppressive movie producers just isn’t Zombie’s style! He needs to let those creative juices run wild and free! And so, thanks to Oren Peli and his Haunted Films label well, Rob Zombie was given carte blanche to do a movie his way, and so here we finally have The Lords of Salem, a true blue Rob Zombie horror film. How was it?

The Lords of Salem revolves around Heidi Hawthorne, a radio DJ whose life begins to take a twist towards the dark side when she receives a mysterious package addressed to her. The package says it comes from “The Lords of Salem” a heavy metal band that she’d interviewed on her radio show. The package is addressed directly to her.  She soon discovers it’s a vinyl record, when she plays it out of sheer curiosity, she goes on a trance, getting these weird visions of witches being burned alive. What's happening to Heidi? Why is she seeing these horrible images? To make things worse, she has a mysterious neighbor who looks at her from the shadows of his apartment down the hall. She tries to be friendly to the new faceless neighbor but the neighbor only slams the door in her face! What gives?

I’ve always said that Rob Zombie is kind of like the Quentin Tarantino of horror films. Same as Tarantino, Rob Zombie watches a bunch of movies, puts them all in a blender and then makes his own thing with them. Take for example House of a 1000 Corpses, which was a homage to Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II (1986). He took elements from both of these movies and mixed them with his own brand of craziness, the result was an experience, uneven at times, but an experience none the less. For The Lords of Salem, Zombie put an even larger amount of films in the grinder! First up, Rob Zombie bows down to one of the greatest directors of our time, Stanley Kubrick. Many shots on the film have that Kubrickian perfection to them; for example Zombie has these long shots of a hallway that echoed those long shots on of the hotel hallways in Kubrick’s The Shinning (1980). I must say that this careful attention to constructing a shot was something new for me in a Rob Zombie film; most of the time Zombie’s camera is kinetic and crazy, moving about in scattershot fashion. On Lords of Salem you can tell that Zombie was going for a slightly more elegant horror film, in this way he paid his respects to Kubrick, which I immediately dug.

Then we have these crazy dream sequences that looked like they came straight out of a Ken Russell film. You ever seen Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) or Lair of the White Worm (1988)? On these films, Russell’s characters always end up having these crazy dreams that feel like acid trips, with religious iconography being profaned. Images of goats and crucifixes and nuns being raped and all that?  Well, on Lords of Salem you will see these types of tripped out dream sequences, one look at them and you can tell Zombie watched a couple of Ken Russell’s films. I’ve yet to see Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), but something tells me that The Devils was a huge influence on The Lords of Salem because that film is also about witches. I also caught similarities with films like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), because of this idea of having a paranoid character surrounded by a bunch of devil worshipping neighbors, and yet another film it reminded me of was The Sentinel (1977), a film about a woman who lives in apartment building that ends up being a gateway to hell. And if I go deeper, then I can also tell ya that certain scenes, especially those involving the witches and their satanic rituals reminded me a lot of Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922). The scenes with the witches dancing naked in the fire and spitting on babies and the such…right out of Haxan in deed. On one scene they put this mask on a witch, an obvious homage to the opening sequences on Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963). So the influences on this one are like a Smorgasbord of horror. What can I say, Rob Zombie knows who to borrow from.

What surprised me the most about Lords of Salem is that Zombie has constructed a film that relies more on mood and feel than on words, like an Italian horror film, there’s very little dialog, the film tells it’s story more through images.  Every shot of the film is dark, brooding, depressive…Zombie really created a permeating, dreadful atmosphere with this one. The film isn’t loud and in your face like House of a 1000 Corpses, this one takes its time, building up the scares. Cheap jump scares are out of the question on this one. No, with this one Zombie wants’ to get inside your head, it is more about creating a sense of impending doom, loved that about it. This isn’t a film where people are running around screaming and running from a chainsaw, nope, this one is about the slow scares that creep up on you, so in that sense it’s a very different type of Rob Zombie film. And yes, it is style over substance, but that’s a good thing in my book when it comes to certain directors. What I mean is that Rob Zombie is an incredible output of artistic energy, the guy is a bonafide Rock Star, still pumping out cool tunes to this day (listen to Dead City Radio if you don’t believe me!), the guy has done comics, cartoons, films…he’s done independent horror films as well as commercial ones, the guy has even done freaking television commercials! Hell, Lords of Salem even has a novelization! In other words, Zombies all about the art, so I like the fact that this movie is not so much about the words and more about the visuals and the mood. And speaking of visuals, Zombie out did himself; at a certain point the film simply turns to eye candy for me, couldn’t take my eyes off. The colors, leaping off the screen! 

Final word on Lords of Salem is that it isn’t a film for everyone, at times it can result truly shocking, especially when it comes to those scenes involving witch rituals. Normally, films about Satanism come off as goofy to me, but when they are done right, it works. And this one pulled it off brilliantly. Like Alucarda (1977), this film is all about people hailing Satan and requesting his presence and all that, which I’m sure will prove to be just a bit too much for some viewers, especially those of you inclined towards Christianity. You’ve been warned! In this movie, there is no hope, it’s all gloom and doom. At the same time, I have to tell you guys that this is without a doubt in my mind Rob Zombies best film; it’s far superior to anything he’s done before and for that I salute the Zombie. I believe Zombie can go even further, but this one was close to being perfect in my book. So if you ask me, Rob Zombie continues to grow and evolve as a horror director, he keeps surprising me and I’m happy he’s still making horror films. He’s turned into one of this generations greatest horror directors. I’m sure he’ll keep it going, I certainly hope he does, which reminds me, there’s hope for horror yet!

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Emerald Forest (1985)

Title: The Emerald Forest (1985)

Director: John Boorman

Cast: Powers Boothe, Charlie Boorman, Meg Foster

Review:

Some real life stories are so outlandish that they simply beg to be made into a film. For example, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest is a film based on the real life events of a man who worked as a lumberjack in the forests of Brazil. One day, while this man was with his family in the forest, a group of natives attacked the family and kidnapped his 10 year old son, Ezequiel. The father spent ten whole years looking for his son deep in the Brazilian jungle, going to depths where not many people dare venture. He asked about the different tribes that lived in the jungle and actually went looking for them.  His search continued  for years until finally, after ten years of searching he found him. Ezequiel was now 21 years old, and had been raised by the natives as one of their own! Would his son want to return to the modern world? Or would he stay with the tribe that raised him for the past ten years? When confronted with these questions Ezequiel answered: “I will not leave my people”.

John Boorman’s film was based on this story that appeared in a newspaper article and though its not 100% accurate to it, it has a lot of it in the film. It’s still a story about a boy that gets kidnapped by aborigines in the Amazonian jungle, but it has an added eco friendly message attached to it. To the films credit, this added element gels perfectly with the story which takes place in a forest meant to be taken down by the powers that  be. The big changes made to the original story involve Power’s Boothe character. Boothe plays the father who looses his son to the aborigines; the change is that instead of him being a lumberjack, in the film he is in charge of the construction of a gigantic damn that will enable a more effective destruction of the rain forest, in this way making room for the proverbial “progress”. Since his son ends living in the forest that he is helping to destroy, a conundrum is created. How can he help destroy the forest that has become his sons’ home?

This is a really interesting concept, and its one that has been played with before, thing is that this time it was based on real life events. Films like A Man Called Horse (1970) presented us with the premise of an English aristocrat who gets captured by Indians. He lives amongst them for various years and learns to understand and accept their life styles and traditions, going through many of their rites of passages until he actually becomes one of them. This theme has also been used in films like Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last Samurai (2003) and most recently Avatar (2010). What this type of film does is, it takes the modern man, the one always looking for progress and ‘civilization’ and puts him in the natives/aborigines shoes. It lets the modern man see what it is to be one of them, lets him see what he is so voraciously trying to destroy. By the end of the movie, the “modern man” sees the beauty of the aborigine’s lifestyle; he sees their connection with nature and the simplicity of their lives. Only by living with them can the modern man truly understand them. By the end of the film, the once modern man is now a changed man, having practically transformed into one of them. This type of film usually  emphasizes the emotion of sympathy, or putting ourselves in the shoes of another to try and understand them.

In eco friendly films like this one, the main theme is how much the modern lifestyle, with its streets and buildings and cars clashes with thae simpler lifestyle that the aborigines live in the forest, one that’s more in connection with nature. In this film,  the tribe that abducts the child is called “The Invisible People” because they live so deep in the forest that no one knows that they even live there. But civilization is catching up to them and soon they begin to realize that the ‘edge of the world’ (where the forest ends and the modern world begins) is getting closer every time. The tribe depicted in the film are a beautiful and simple society that loves to enjoy the pleasures of nature and community. They practice their own religion, and their own traditions. They also love to take their peyote! The scenes of The Invisible People going on peyote trips allowed the filmmakers to play with surreal imagery and dream sequences where the characters connect with their spirit animals.

It’s interesting to not that the kid who gets snatched away by the aborigines is played by Charlie Boorman, director John Boorman’s own son. It felt to me as I watched this movie that by casting his own son in the role of Tommy, Boorman was putting his own son through a rite of passage as well. In the film, Tommy is raised by The Invisible People to the point where he becomes one of them. And at a certain point he has to go through these rites of passage so he can become a man. The point being that if he manages to survive that ordeal, he will then become a true man, ready to take on the real world. Boorman’s son was in his late teens while making this film, so maybe Boorman cast his own son as a cinematic rite of passage. In real life, Boorman was seeing his son turn into a man, so he cast him in a film where the same thing happens to the character. Filmmakers often reflect their own life experiences in the films they make; it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what Boorman was going for with The Emerald Forest. Not a bad idea either, Charlie Boorman pretty much nails the complex role which included playing a character that spoke in the tribes language for the whole duration of the film.

This film won awards for best cinematography, and I can’t argue there, the film is beautiful to look at. The Invisible People wear very little clothes, but on special occasions they wear lots of colorful bird feathers that make for some very colorful visuals. The shots of the forest and the Amazonian landscape are amazing, especially because a large part of the film was really shot in the amazon, giving the film a bit of a Herzogian feel to it. My thanks go out to John Boorman who chose the most beautiful actresses to play the tribes females, who I might add are half naked for most of the film. So what we got here ladies and gentlemen is a very eco friendly film that was beautifully shot and acted. It has some very heartfelt moments in it. Many people hold this one close to their hearts because it’s both visually beautiful and has a great message against the destruction of the Amazonian forest which gets smaller by the day. I remember having seen The Emerald Forest as a kid and loving it, and now, many years after I originally saw it in 1985 I revisited it and loved it even more. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 out of 5