31

31 Movie Review

A group of carnival workers are kidnapped and put in a game where the only way to win is to stay alive for twelve hours. The group moves from room to room in a maze, facing killers and lunatics of varying degrees, all dressed as clowns. This Rob Zombie-directed film stars lots of people he has worked with in the past, including his wife Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Meg Foster, Richard Brake, and Malcolm McDowell, among others, while also featuring the glorious return to the big screen of the legendary Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, the man who played my personal favorite Sweathog, Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington, on Welcome Back, Kotter.

Boom Boom Mon

This movie is filled with violence, gore, profanity, nudity, trashy characters, vulgar dialogue--everything you come to expect from a Rob Zombie film, and therein lies the problem--after over a half dozen films, Zombie is still not bringing anything new to the table. This movie plays out exactly as you expect it to, all the way to who makes it out of the house and what happens after that. Set in 1976, it's obvious this movie is a nod to the grindhouse exploitation films of that era, and in terms of that, Zombie does a good job with this film, but that novelty soon gives way to uninteresting characters, a story that is a hybrid of many much better films that came before it, and cliche after cliche. 31 is filled with potential, but turns out to be just another run of the mill horror flick.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 5

31 Movie Trailer