31 movie review & film summary (2016)

Here's where Zombie's jeremiad-like fervor gets a little hard to swallow: since his political arena boils down to taunts and violence, there's not a lot separating the baddies' actions to the good guys' responses. There is, therefore, a generic assumption of how murder works in "31:" we want the bad guys to die because they've picked the wrong side.

Still, villains beg for their lives, as I mentioned above, because there's something brutal and unsparing about Zombie's kill scenes. These sequences are shot with a frenetic shaky-cam style. But you can feel Zombie's adoration/fascination with his actor's body language and facial features even when they're at the point of dying. He uses leering medium and extreme close-ups to emphasize his actors' contorted grins/scowls, the bags under their eyes, and the ferocious will to live that transforms their faces into living masks. Zombie spends just as much time lingering on the toothy grin of Jeff Daniel Phillips, playing a white-hat-wearing horndog, as he does doting on Brake's hollowed-out stare. These aren't meat puppets: they're people with individual personalities, regardless of whether they choose to make the right choices or not.

That having been said: "31" is not so different from Zombie's earlier films, particularly the alienatingly rough-around-the-edges "House of 1000 Corpses," that it will somehow win over those who aren't already interested in his work. Zombie tends to throw stuff at the wall, and see what sticks. He's an intuitive filmmaker, and his style is loud and jarring. So I know you're probably already shaking your head at me by this point, but trust me, I get it: "31" is going to be a hard-sell for anyone but card-carrying Zombie-ites. 

That being said, "31" feels like something new from Zombie. It feels like an adrenaline-high cry to action from an accomplished artist. Zombie may not be working outside of his comfort zone, but "31" is one of his most impressive films to date.