Having watched and been less-than-impressed with this movie's predecessor, House of 1000 Corpses, I wasn't expecting much from this one when it showed up on my TiVo. I gave it a shot, though, because I had heard it was a better effort.
Wrong.
This one was actually worse. At least Ho1KC had a few surrealistic touches, like the opening ride through Captain Spaulding's funhouse and the chase through Dr. Satan's realm underground. Sure, they didn't make any sense, but they were at least something interesting to look at. It also tried to go for more of an underground vibe in terms of production, with shock cuts, cheapo video effects and so on.
This movie played it mostly straight, getting rid of most of the bizarre stuff and replacing it with more torture porn and more white trash. A subplot was added involving a sheriff out for revenge, in an attempt (I suppose) to keep us rooting for the Driftwoods, the psycho family that are the nominal protagonists here. It didn't work - each new character that was introduced was worse than the last, resulting in a film full of people I didn't want to spend any more time with.
Tiresome, pointless and only a minimal amount of fun. The best parts by far were the opening credits (set to "Midnight Rider") and the closing credits (a nice relaxing swoop over some country roadways set to a cool song called "Seed Of Memory" that I hadn't heard before). Everything else can go away. One star.
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