3 From Hell (Lionsgate Blu-Ray review)

Is 3 From Hell Treasure or Trash?

Blu-ray Distributed By Lionsgate / October 15, 2019

After barely surviving a furious shootout with the police, Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie) Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) are behind bars. But pure evil cannot be contained, and a firestorm of murder, madness and mayhem will be released in this terror ride to Hell…and back.

Jamie’s Take (2 / 5)

For me, Rob Zombie is a very hit and miss director. I feel his best films are his two supernatural horror films: House of 1,000 Corpses and The Lords of Salem. The Devil’s Rejects, the sequel to House, is typically considered his best film but I wasn’t keen on the characteristic changes done to the characters and its use of making these monsters suddenly heroes. The two Halloween remakes have moments I liked but overall both films are missed opportunities. The less said about 31 the better. Which now leads me to 3 From Hell, the third film in the Firefly family series which owes more to Devil’s than House. So now, dear readers, you know where I stand with Mr. Zombie’s films so you can get a general idea if you may or may not agree with what I am about to say.

While the final conclusion of The Devil’s Rejects has our main three anti-heros (use that term lightly) being gunned down by the police, somehow miraculously they all survive and are now on Death Row. Told as if this was a documentary and shot what appears to be 16 mm film (the entire film was shot digitally though) the first 20 minutes of 3 From Hell are captivating and what I feel may be the best bit of directing Zombie has ever done.

I was hoping the film was going to do a somewhat take on serial killers and the popularity of what serial killers are to American culture. While this has already been done before in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, I wanted to see a more serious, terrifying take on the notoriety of these killers. However that is only the opening of the film and the actual movie begins as (spoiler warning!) Captain Spaulding is put to death and Otis Driftwood being sprung from jail by a half brother Winslow Foxworth (Richard Brake, a Zombie regular). Finally out of jail, the two brothers decide to devise a plan to break Baby out of jail.

All the moments with Baby in jail feel as if Zombie was trying to pay homage to Black Emanuelle films or maybe the Ilsa movies with Baby now out of her mind and dealing with a wicked lesbian prison guard (Dee Wallace) who wants to either kill Baby or have her way with her. All of these moments are quite good and honestly for the first 50 minutes of 3 From Hell, I was really enjoying the movie as it was exciting, dark, and at times creepy.

Then the film goes off the rails…

I am not sure what Zombie was thinking here but once his characters have all broken out of jail and dispatching various characters in gruesome ways, he didn’t seem to know what to do or where these characters should go. Zombie decides to have his characters go to Mexico where they get drunk, high, laid, play in a knife throwing contest (this sequence is both mundane and overlong) until it is decided to basically rehash The Devil’s Rejects in that a family member of one of the people the Firefly clan killed wants revenge and goes after the three.

If you told me the last 20 minutes was going to involve Mexican gangsters in wrestling Santo masks in a shootout with Baby dressed in an Indian headdress killing various gangsters with a bow and arrow (with awful CGI gore flying about), I would not have believed it. But alas, that’s what happens and with a running time of 115 minutes, I couldn’t wait for the movie to just end. I cannot think of a better word but the second half of the film is just simply dumb.

Like the two Halloween films, there are moments that could have been great. I love how Baby is now nuts and there is a moment where Otis even says that she has changed. That should have been played up more, that prison has now changed her to the point of being incoherently nutty but the movie wants to center more on the carnage and dark humor. Also, while I understand that Haig was very sick at the time the film was in production and could not do the movie, Winston is just another Otis. In fact, aside from Winston’s love of old movies, it is essentially the same character and I kept wondering how many siblings are there in this family?

And can Zombie stop with the slow motion scenes of characters walking? It bogs the film down, not to mention its a style that has now been overdone and over used in so many films that I hope I never see it again.

Lionsgate blu ray release looks good and like most Zombie blu rays, he does have an audio commentary track that is very good and worth a listen. He always provides great commentary tracks and doesn’t hold back on his feelings so I was happy to have another one of his commentary tracks on blu ray. Lionsgate has also added a long, four part documentary on the making of the film from pre-production to the final release. Both special features are great and worth checking out. Strangely the DVD is an edited R rated version of the film where the blu ray is the unrated version.

I really wanted to like the 3 From Hell. In fact I saw it in the theater on one of the special three nights it was released back in September. But the film is a major disappointment especially for the fact that the first half of the movie was very good (I would love to see a Rob Zombie film that he doesn’t write). Given all the time that has passed since The Devil’s Rejects, I am saddened to say this third entry is the weakest entry in the series although I am sure fans of Zombie and the other films will want to seek this out and judge for themselves.