31 Movie Review

31 is a 2016 horror movie directed by Rob Zombie and starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Malcolm McDowell, Meg Foster and Richard Brake.

This film begins with a guy called Doom Head(Brake) who is in a dank building with a priest who is tied up and frightened. He gets paid to do what he does.  He brings out an axe and kills the priest. He is going to tell a story. Cut to a group of carnival workers who are travelling along in a van. It is 1976. They are travelling along the road on Halloween night and they see scarecrows in the middle of the road. They get out to move them, but they are kidnapped by masked people and taken to a huge building where they are met by three weirdos dressed up in aristocratic clothes. The  main one is called Father Napoleon-Horatio-Silas Murder(McDowell) and he has two women with him. He tells the captives that they are going to play a game called '31' which consists of them being chased by psychopaths. All they have to do is survive for 12 hours.

The group consists of Charly(Moon Zombie), Venus Virgo(Foster), Roscoe(Jeff Daniel Phillips), Panda(Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) and Levon. They are all set loose and the psycho who is after them is called Sick Head. He chases them and they have to survive. The other psychos are called Psycho Head, Schizo Head, Death Head and Sex Head. The group thins out as they face each of the psychos.
SPOILERS COMING UP SO BE WARNED!!!! Charly is the only one who is left in the end and the baddies call in Doom Head as the rest of the psycho killers are dead. He is the top guy and he comes in to get Charly. He almost kills her when he is stopped by his employers who tell him that the 12 hours are up and she has won the game. They set her free. The movie ends with Charly stumbling along the road, free while the weirdo employers return to themselves and leave. Doom Head is not happy at losing his chance to kill her so  he follows her and they face off. What happens is left to your imagination.

This film was a let down for me. I liked the initial idea but the execution is poor. The dialogue is terrible in parts. The acting is bad. The whole movie feels like a joke in parts and it is not very scary. Maybe that is what Zombie was going for here, but it didn't work for me. McDowell was terrible here and I don't know how Meg Foster ended up in it. I laughed in parts as it was just silly. I expected more of this but it doesn't deliver. I am not a huge Rob Zombie fan and I would say that this is on a par with his Halloween 2 for being crappy. On a brighter note, I did like the character of Doom Head. He was played well by Richard Brake and that was one good thing about the film. I just didn't get this and I am giving it a 3/10 and that is being kind!