Movie Review: 31 (2016)
Rob Zombie’s new film 31 is a film set on Halloween in 1973, where a group of friends is kidnapped and forced to play a sadistic game, where they are thrown into some sort of maze and forced to try to survive while being hunted by killers. There are a few people who have organized this, and they place wagers on who will be killed.
31 is a decent film. If you are familiar with Rob Zombie’s work, it will be nothing new. A lot of the scenes are shot in the same gritty manner as always. Sheri Moon Zombie is one of the main characters, which is also nothing new, and we will touch on that later in this review. There are some gritty kill scenes and some brutal, killer antagonists as usual. While the film has a great concept, it’s a re-used one. The visual style of the people running the show was similar to those from the Hunger Games, and the post-modern style of the game of 31 itself seemed to be a toned-down version of what was done in The Running Man. They also don’t really do a very good job explaining what 31 is, or why there are a handful of people gambling on it.
The differences were that in this film almost nothing seemed to happen. There were a couple of moments where you felt like the main characters were in danger, but for the most part, the enemies were somewhat boring and didn’t have any weapons that were much better than what the people trying to survive had. I found myself thinking very often that the killers were not very well-armed the entire time watching it. If you are looking for gore, there is plenty of it, which is par for the course for Zombie and is done well in this film.
While Zombie does a good job of pulling this off, there just wasn’t enough to keep it interesting. There were only a few people participating. When they woke up in the game, they have only things like lead pipes and baseball bats as weapons. It seems like varying this a bit more would have made it a bit more exciting. Also, the people hunting them were few and didn’t have anything special either for weapons, aside from a couple of chainsaws. These lose their thunder in situations like this. If I am holding a giant steel pipe, I think I have a decent shot against your chainsaw. They are very cumbersome and not easy to swing.
This movie would have also been much better had Sheri Moon Zombie not been in it. We are not in any way saying that she isn’t a great actress, or even that we don’t like seeing her in films, because we do. That being said, we think that with her being one of the main characters, at this point people are making her the focal point of the conversation surrounding the film before even seeing it. She is so familiar, and his style of filming is so similar, that it’s almost like she is just playing “Sheri Moon Zombie” and not the character. She is larger than her role in the Zombie universe if that makes sense. We could have easily seen 31 as a Firefly family spinoff film where Baby and Otis get hijacked and kidnapped and forced into this together. That is something I would have been behind. But this film as a completely separate entity would have done better if they had used another actress for her character that audiences weren’t familiar with. We think that this would have made a huge difference. We also think the same could be said for Lords Of Salem, but that is for another time.
All-in-all, I think 31 was an ok horror film, but it could have been so much more.
