Rob Zombie's Disturbing Horror Movie Trilogy Is Worth Revisiting For Halloween

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the films of Rob Zombie. I think Mr. Zombie has great instincts as a director and is able to create effective, disturbing images. On the other hand, he's a dreadful screenwriter, especially when it comes to dialogue — he's fond of having his characters utter non-stop obscenities that make them sound like grade schoolers who just discovered curse words exist. And yet, Zombie is clearly such a horror nerd — the type who would likely be haunting horror conventions looking for autographs if he wasn't a rich and famous guy — that I can't help but appreciate him.

Zombie made the leap to filmmaking with "House of 1000 Corpses," a silly, nasty piece of work that inadvertently launched an entire trilogy of films. That trilogy, dubbed Rob Zombie's Firefly Trilogy, now has a nifty new 4K box set from Lionsgate, just in time for Halloween. Zombie clearly loves Halloween season as much as he loves horror movies, and that's another thing that endears him to me: I'm a big old Halloween nerd.

"House of 1000 Corpses" has become a cult favorite, and it was not exactly easy to bring it to the screen. Universal Pictures was originally supposed to release the pic, but an NC-17 rating spooked the studio, so they shelved it. Of course, this is the type of controversy that's catnip to horror fans, and when Zombie eventually got Lionsgate to release the movie in 2003, genre fans turned the low-budget affair into a modest hit (for his part, Zombie has called the film a "calamitous mess"). A franchise was born.

A riff on "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "House of 1000 Corpses" is a horror story about young people falling afoul of a serial killer family. But what makes Zombie's take a bit different is that he clearly sympathizes more with the killers than the victims. There's a mean-spiritedness here that the filmmaker takes even further with the superior sequel, "The Devil's Rejects."

Cruel and scuzzy, "Rejects" is solely focused on the killers while "House" spent a bit more time with their potential victims. Here, Zombie wants us to root for the bad guys all the way, and he pulls this off by introducing a determined lawman (William Forsythe) who is even more sadistic than they are.

"Devil's Rejects" feels pretty conclusive, especially since it seemingly kills off our anti-hero serial killers in the final reel. And yet, Zombie decided to return to the well one last time with "3 from Hell." The least successful of the three films, Zombie still manages to pull off some memorable brutal moments here and there.

Zombie would go on to make other films, with varying success. His "Halloween" movies are controversial, but they have their defenders (for my part, I think his first "Halloween" is terrible, but his "Halloween II" is a major improvement). "The Lords of Salem" is perhaps his most well-made and interesting film, and the less said about "31" the better (I've yet to watch his "Munsters" movie, so I can't offer an opinion there).

The Firefly Trilogy isn't subtle. It's not smart, or original, or even inventive. And yet there's a raw madness to the whole affair that's easy to get sucked into. Rob Zombie is an unsophisticated filmmaker, but sometimes you want greasy fried junk instead of a gourmet meal.

The new box 4K set gives the trilogy its due, featuring not just "House of 1000 Corpses" on 4K for the first time, but also a a Zombie-curated photography book, legacy features, and the two documentaries "30 Days in Hell: The Making of The Devil's Rejects" and "To Hell and Back: The Making of 3 From Hell." Happy Halloween.