Lionsgate released Rob Zombie’s Firefly Trilogy in a set earlier this month. If you choose these films for your Halloween movie marathon, Zombie’s grimy, unsettling, bleak, ugly, uncomfortable aesthetic is enhanced by 4K.
It begins with House of 1000 Corpses, the movie Universal disowned. Lionsgate swooped in to the rescue. The film introduces the Firefly family, clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby Firefly (Sherri Moon Zombie) and mother Firefly (Karen Black) but this has the trappings of a traditional slasher movie.
Some kids on a road trip (Rainn Wilson, Erin Daniels, Chris Hardwick and Jennifer Jostyn) stop by Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters & Madmen. They also pick up Baby as a hitchhiker, an homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so if they ever had the sense to leave, she gets them to drive her to the family’s home. Once it’s too late, the kids discover past crimes of the Firefly family too.
The usual accoutrements of horror provide a lot of exquisite 4K darkness. The night behind Spaulding’s blinking sign and the dark night ride are pure and deep. When we get to Otis’s house with the kidnapped cheerleaders, the darkness of his dwelling offers no resp...