I had an embedded link on this photo to cite it’s source, but it now leads to an escort service website.

So I haven’t posted anything here in more than half a year but since I’ve gained no followers it hardly matters. That’s OK though cause the reason I’ve come back is because I’ve always liked the interface here and really like how all my blogs look on the site.

Another interesting piece of news is how much film this year has shocked me. For better or for worse my expectations this year have been shattered for almost every movie I’ve seen this year. I was crushed by how piss awful Man of Steel was, I was surprised how good Iron man 3 was, and on an interesting note I was surprised how much I personally like the Shamalon film After Earth, even though I thought it was bad I still liked it a lot and that was interesting. But the film that has caught me completely off guard this year, hell not just this film but the director too is as you can tell from the title of this blog entry, Mister Rob Zombies : The Lords of Salem. I want to thank Half in the Bag review of this movie because I probably wouldn’t of been interested in seeing the movie in the slightest without there review and after you read this and maybe even after you watch the movie because they do “give away” a lot in that review but its still fun to listen too, you should check there review out too. Along with all there reviews if you haven’t seen them. OK got the plug for them out of the way just gotta check off sell my soul to The Devil (AKA Red Letter Media), OK now I can review this movie. (Eyes turn red)

So The Lords of Salem is a different kinda movie from what I’ve reviewed on here so far. I think I’ve only reviewed scifi-action type stuff on this blog thus far like Star Trek and Transformers material. The “plot” revolves around Rob Zombies wife (Sheri Moon Zombie) character who is a weird looking women with dread locks who’s always having her butt hang out from her pants or is just exposing everything for the audiences pleasure. She works at a radio station were they play hard core rock music all day and make a bunch of weird ass comments while they do it. Her friends are young Rob Zombie and Ken Foree and people may say there all terrible at acting but to me there appropriate for this movie that at least makes it more fun than recent horror movies like Paranormal Activity (vomits). They then get a record from an anonymous sender and the only thing written on it is “The Lords” so Ken Foree names the bands record The Lords of Salem. Whenever this record plays however women listening to it become entranced but Sheri just gets a major headache and almost collapse and in some cases does collapse whenever she hears it. I could describe the rest of the plot but its really pointless you can pretty much tell whats going to happen its how some of this stuff happens that makes this the great film that it is.

Lets just get to the stuff that makes this movie amazing. I guess it would only make sense to explain what I like about Rob Zombies style. He takes generic horror scenes and tropes that a normally generic and bad but he executes them in a different way like Sheri Moon’s character shes not a generically beautiful wife whose husband curiosity endangers her and her kids. But the best example of this is in the author character. He’s not played super straight and serious he’s just this energetic old guy with this wacky venezuelan wife. And the best scene in the whole film is when he goes to another author character to do research on the Salem witch trials and both of them are just laughing about the whole thing saying its a bunch of B.S. and its not the scene that you get in those paranormal activity movies were they Google image symbols they find and that’s supposed to scare you. And he does seem kinda frightened the whole time I think it more just stems from his curiosity of whats happening. But lets get to the real meat of the film and that is the visuals. Not to disrespect the actors there all very good for the roles there playing especially the author guy he is really good in the movie. But the visuals are really the star of this movie and for those who don’t know the difference between good visuals and good special effects here’s the difference. Special effects are mostly measured on a numbers and technical scale visuals are measured in how effective they help tell the story and while I guess this doesn’t have much of a story to push there still damn effective visuals. There are shots in this movie that feel like the Shining and that’s a big compliment but at the same time they don’t feel like an imitation or a rip off they feel like their own thing. While I believe this film is worth seeing for the good visuals in it there are some that aren’t quite as good but its always able to bounce back with something to make up for it. The only problem is that the visuals are the only thing that push the movie forward, the script is very unbalanced at times because if Rob Zombies not one thing it’s a good screenwriter.

The pacing of the film is pretty clunky it gets off to a nice slow start but I have a feeling Zombie or some producer was scared of it being too slow for some audiences so he put a lot of scenes in this movie that just feel like you should of saved it for later or spread it out more. There’s like 5 dream sequences back to back in the film and it gets tiresome after a while. But then the film takes a turn for the best and at the end it just becomes the most serial piece of entertainment I’ve seen in years and it just goes off the rails in the best possible way were its just shot after shot of varying quality. Some of them feel like Zombies music video side creeping in but some of the stuff was just beautiful (in an ugly way of course). I guess this reviews been kinda unbalanced but I guess if I had to use an excuse its like the movies its based off.

So is this a really a great movie? No not really, it’s not very well written it’s all over the place most of the time and it has a serious pacing problem, but do I do find myself loving this movie? Absolutely! It really seemed like it was trying to be different in a way that still felt like it was for something. I think it pays off of the most part and should be viewed by any horror movie fan. And hell if you can stomach weird visuals disturbing gore and uncomfortable nudity I’d say go see it if your really into good imagery and cinematography. The film really is gorgeous and even some of the scenes I think are really brilliantly and interestingly executed and written. This film was only about 1.5 million to make I mean that’s nuts for a movie made this year and its one of the best looking movies I’ve seen all year and that’s probably because the people making it cared. Whether or not you like Rob Zombie this movie is much more visually appealing than lots of movies this year like Man of Steel which was an eye sore to look at from start to finish

So go see The Lords of Salem if you can take what was described above. Try to imagine Rosemarys Baby taken to its furthest extreme were you see everything Rosemary’s Baby didn’t show you in detail. Scale from 1-10 I guess I’ll start doing that. This is a 6, personally one of my favorites but I still can’t ignore the clunky pacing and some scenes that just go no were. But for the reasons stated above its still a masterpiece in my eyes.

So that was what I’d like to think as my first real review. Tell me what you thought of the movie in the comments a help spawn a conversation about this wonderful film.