(Second Review.) <br /><br />"My brain is frozen!" Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) yells at a trio of bound-and-gagged cheerleaders at one point, and I felt the same way. Even on second glance, "House of 1,000 Corpses" is awful, simply because form and narrative is jettisoned for a near-endless string of abrasively avant-garde camera techniques (loud color filters, cut scenes that come out of nowhere, aged-down video quality, negative filters, split screen, etc.) chosen because...well, "they look cool," I guess. They certainly don't augment any narrative purpose with their constant assault, and this makes sense, given Rob Zombie's previous background in music-video direction.<br /><br />The story itself is a muddled mess. There are at least 3 separate plots going on, none of which are given sufficient attention. The scene is set when a carload of grating college students (including former "Singled Out" host Chris Hardwick and "The Office"'s Rainn Wilson), writing a book on weird roadside attractions, run afoul of Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig–"Spider Baby"), the flour-faced clown proprietor of a combination gas station/fried chicken stand/Murder Ride. Said students learn of the local legend of Dr. Satan, but get sidetracked by obnoxious hitchhiker Baby (Sheri Moon, Zombie's wife), who brings our zeroes home for a night of torture, terror, and totally gross overacting by her kin, the Fireflies. But what of the aforementioned cheerleaders, who are made out to be a plot point? And why do we spend most of the movie with the grating Fireflies when the Dr. Satan thread would have made a far more interesting film? <br /><br />Who knows, who cares. While Zombie may have never read about postmodernism in film, "Corpses" fits the criteria to a T–this is a fanboy movie that wears its '70s influence on its sleeve (going so far as to set the movie on October 30 and 31, and making blatant the socio-economic commentary that Tobe Hooper's infinitely superior "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" smoothly implied). The Firefly family is yet another riff on the inbred sickos of Hooper's seminal masterpiece crossed with the mountain loonies of "The Hills Have Eyes"–but whereas the characters in those films gave naturalistic performances (that made them seem all the more real), Zombie writes dialog like an invitation for histrionics from his C-listers; Moseley spends most of the film screaming his lines; Moon's helium-inflected voice is irritating; and Karen Black's over-the-hill slut routine is embarrassing. Haig emerges relatively unscathed, as his presence is reduced to a handful of scenes. And the less said about our wayward heroes, the better. Zombie doesn't present any characters worth caring about, and his penchant for third-grader gross-out gags induces more groans than guffaws.<br /><br />But above all, "Corpses" fails in the department it was most heralded in: a throwback to gritty, 1970s horror. The aforementioned overzealousness of the director is so unnatural that the viewer is constantly being reminded of the film's modernity as it pulls out all the tricks in the book. More than anything, it feels like a renegade from the direct-to-video bin, where it should have gone in the first place.<br /><br />That being said, "Corpses" did invoke a consistent feeling of unease in my gut, and I thought the story threads introduced could have yielded an entertaining (and '70s-faithful) finished product if handled with any bit of seriousness. And the last 15 minutes are easily the best in the film–taking place in dark catacombs with zombies and a red-tinged S&M club for lobotomy patients is very well-done, as it is the only time Zombie reins in all his camera tricks and focuses on atmosphere and suspense. Too bad the same can't be said for the rest of this bloody mess.