*Originally written September 18th, 2016*
"End my life"
31 is Rob Zombie’s latest and probably most vile contribution to cinema yet. I’ve not had a good history with Zombie’s filmography. Aside from his first Halloween remake and The Devil’s Rejects, I loathe everything he’s had to offer. Yet, I was still oddly interested in ’31’. While I was sure I’d probably hate it (Which I did), I still thought it had some sort of potential. Sadly, it’s just a poorly filmed, fairly tame and boring affair.
Sheri Moon Zombie (Because who else?) leads a group of five people who are kidnapped and taken to ‘Murder World’, where they are trapped and forced to play a murderous game where they must survive for 12 hours while being attacked by increasingly psychotic psychopaths. It’s oddly similar to 1987’s The Running Man, but more sadistic and without the charm.
I don’t mind the set-up, it’s a fairly obvious plot that could have made for some genre fun, it’s just that thanks to Zombie’s style, it’s nothing less than horrible. There are some fun ideas littered in here. We get a Nazi midget clown, a demented idea that feels right out the Borderlands series and Richard Brake actually gives a pretty terrifying performance as the final psychopath ‘Doom-Head’. He plays it as the most sadistic Joker we’ll never get in a Batman film.
Brake aside, the rest of the cast are horrific. Sheri Moon Zombie plays it as she always does: obnoxious and unbearable as our “final girl”, the lead we’re meant to root for, but instead I wanted to see her get slaughtered. Same went for the rest of the cast, all just awful, terrible people who you can’t root for. The strangest performance and appearance had to be from Malcolm McDowell as one of the puppet masters to the game of 31. He plays it as this weird aristocrat. It was bizarre. I was sitting there thinking to myself “You’ve been in A Clockwork Orange and now in your older age you’re degrading yourself to this”. It was embarrassing.
Zombie himself has called 31 his “most brutal film to date”, which might, or might not be true. It was hard to tell due to the awful shakey-cam work that made Paul Greengrass look coherent. Thanks to this awful camerawork that was probably done to hide the films extremely low-budget, it made the film lose any of its visceral impact, making it feel very tame. Zombie had to edit 31 in order to avoid the dreaded ‘NC-17’ rating, I’m not too sure what could have warranted this, as most of the violence is no worse and probably less gory than his previous work. There is an uncut version to be released on Blu-ray at some point, but for now, we’re left with soft cut that shouldn’t have happened. If you’re gonna go all out, then go all out, don’t let censorship ruin your artistic vision.
None of 31 looks even remotely nice. Everything is grimy, dark, disgusting and ugly to look at, which is probably the point, but that doesn’t make a compelling film to look at. It makes a boring film to look at. The sets look like they were covered in faeces and urine before filming, which would have made for an authentic haunted-house ride, but not a film.
This actually would have probably worked better as some Halloween attraction at somewhere like Thorpe Park. Zombie composed the score, which actually wasn’t too bad. A little bit of a thumping and generic score, but it stands out compared to everything else on display. The film also closes to Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’, which is a nice choice, even if the film’s ending is very weak and lazy.
2/10 Dans
31 is out now on DVD in the UK
Watch the trailer below:
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