31 (2016)
Directed by Rob Zombie
Five carnival workers are kidnapped and held hostage in an abandoned, Hell-like compound where they are forced to participate in a violent game, the goal of which is to survive twelve hours against a gang of sadistic clowns.
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His enclosed, referential universe – here, one scene is a supposedly straight reprise of a comedy cannibal bit from The Rocky Horror Picture Show – is like the circus puppet display that’s the keynote visual of 31: wooden people jerking about repetitively and hacking each other to bits.
Which is basically “The Most Dangerous Game” meets “Saw,” plus elements of Oliver Stone’s “Seizure,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and so on.
Like his 2003 first feature House of 1000 Corpses, 31 is especially indebted to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Funhouse – but the frenzy of homage has worn so thin that it seems less a fond hark-back to the drive-in horrors of the 1970s and the video nasties of the 1980s than a latecoming entry in the torture porn cycle which peaked circa 2007 amid sequels to and imitations of Hostel and Saw.
Because, naturally, we’re supposed to feel inclined to care about what happens to any of them, especially as the film devolves from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to a garish mix of The Running Man, Saw, Death Race, and The Funhouse.
Rob Zombie edifica, de este modo, un particular parque temático dotado de esa estética sucia y setentera que siempre le ha caracterizado, siguiendo los pasos argumentales de otras ginkanas mortales como las de Perseguido (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) o la serie Saw, a la vez que toma prestadas (muchas) referencias de otro clásico menor de Tobe Hooper como es La casa de los horrores (1981), aquel slasher ambientado en una feria ambulante.
Because, naturally, we’re supposed to feel inclined to care about what happens to any of them, especially as the film devolves from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to a garish mix of The Running Man, Saw, Death Race, and The Funhouse.