PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 4/17/03)

You want pleasant dreams? Try counting sheep. But if you want a surefire way to induce nightmares, then I recommend trying to keep up with the ever-growing number of corpses in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses. In a film set across a three-day Halloween romp in 1977, I counted five dead cheerleaders, four cross-country joyriders, two cops, two robbers, and one old geezer who probably had it coming anyway. At that rate, it would take nearly a year — and a steady supply of oblivious and curious coeds — to reach the movie's "1,000 customers severed" mark.

Then again, Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen seems to do pretty steady business in these parts. The bizarre gas station-cum-freak show serves roughly the same purpose here that the backwoods barbecue shack did in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Stop in for a scare, get a complimentary bucket of fried chicken. Never mind that they don't serve red meat in this joint; the family that tends the "slaughterhouse" up the street keep their knives sharpened just in case.

Zombie's film plays more like an experimental pastiche than an outright homage to those classic road-trip-gone-wrong movies, lifting clips from all manner of sources (old horror movies, vintage stag films, etc.) and cobbling them together in a genuinely frightening, if not altogether logical, new way. Everything references something else in this movie, and I'm inclined to give Zombie credit for all the connections. Captain Spaulding, for instance, is the name of Groucho's character in the Marx brothers comedy Animal Crackers. And the answer seems to matter when a razor-wielding young woman threatens to scalp a kid for incorrectly guessing her favorite actress (it's Bette Davis, by the way). But what does it all mean? Or is the explanation stashed somewhere with the other 986 corpses?

— Peter Debruge