Directed by: Rob Zombie
Notable cast: Sherri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig,
Richard Brake
3 From Hell is a movie that requires some context to
fully understand, so it’s necessary to briefly summarize how we got here first.
Rob Zombie’s first movie, House of 1000 Corpses, tells us of the Firefly
clan, a family of Texas psychopaths who trap tourists searching for the local
spooky legend, an ex-Nazi scientist named Dr. Satan. In 1978, seven months after
the killings depicted in the first filmSheriff Quincy Wydell leads a raid on
the Firefly house. This kicks off the second film, The Devil’s Rejects,
and the ensuing firefight kills most of the serial killing family and leads to
the capture of the family matriarch who’s subsequently tortured to death by
Wydell. Two members escape and act as our effective franchise protagonists. The
first is Otis Driftwood, played by Bill Moseley (who’s own genre star-making performance
in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 made him a natural fit in Zombie’s TCM
inspired world) who is a murderer, rapist, and self-aggrandizing taxidermist with
a nihilist streak. The other is Baby, played by the director’s wife, Sherri
Moon Zombie in her signature role, who is a deranged, dangerous, childish, and
a game playing killer with a tenuous grip on reality at best. The two are joined
eventually by Captain Spaulding (Haig), an evil clown and purveyor of “The
Museum of Monsters and Madmen”, who sent victims to the Firefly’s by spreading
the legend of Dr. Satan and, as we also find out, is Baby’s father. After The
Devil’s Rejects (a self-branded moniker) are finally captured and confronted by
Sheriff Wydell, they escape again just to drive straight into a wall of police,
and the firefight (set, reasonably on the nose, to ‘Freebird’) ends the
violent, terrible lives of the three human monsters. It’s a neat, perfect
capper to what is a horrid, unblinking examination of the human capacity for
evil. There are no heroes in this story, only bad people and worse people, and
most couldn’t imagine we would ever revisit anyone from the family.