The Lords of Salem
(2012) 101 min.
Rated: R (nudity, mild gore, sexual themes)
Country: USA / UK / Canada
Director: Rob Zombie
Starring: Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Judy Geeson, Meg Foster, Jeff Daniel Phillips
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Salem’s rock DJ named Heidi is given a mysterious record, which plays a song from a group called the Lords.
Synopsis:
The movie opens with a coven of witches chanting over a fire. They remove their clothes and dance and laugh and chant in a lively way over the fire.
The movie starts with Heidi (Zombie) lying naked in bed asleep. She gets up, pets her dog, then steps outside to get the mail on her doorstep.
She sees a shadowy figure down the hall near apartment #5, but it doesn’t respond and slams the door. Heidi sighs and goes back into her apartment.
Later she goes down and sees her landlady Lacy. She asks about apartment 5 and Lacy tells her that there is no one in that apartment.
She goes to her job as a DJ at the local Salem rock station. There she and her co-hosts play music and interview musicians. At the end of her shift the receptionist gives her a package. It’s a wooden box with music from “The Lords”.
She and her bearded friend, Whitey (Phillips), decide to play the record. The music is very simple and repetitious. This grating noise causes Heidi to enter a trance-like state and imagines a woman giving birth among the witches. The leader of them spits on the infant and remarks at how “vile” it is. She also remarks on how they have failed.
Whitey removes the needle from the record and looks at Heidi who says “I suddenly got super tired” as she stands with her eyes closed. Whitey spends the night over at Heidi’s house.
The next day Heidi goes to a drug addict’s anonymous meeting briefly and then she’s off to work at the station. While at the station they have a guest named Francis Matthias who wrote a book titled Satan’s Last Stand : The Truth About the Salem Witch Trials. He confirms that there never were any “real” witches. Just people that were having psychotic episodes and that the only witches currently living in Salem are Wiccans.
After their guest speaks, the DJs start to play the album from The Lords. At the sound of this music many women start to feel entranced. Heidi requests that the music be muted since it causes her to have a headache.
At home Francis asks his wife if she heard him on the radio. She tells him that she recorded it and so he shares with her how curious and familiar the name of music group “The Lords of Salem” seems.
Heidi arrives home and is invited by Lucy to join her sisters for a quiet evening. They drink wine and Lucy introduces her two sisters Sonny and Megan. Sonny does self-improvement coaching and Megan does palm reading. Megan decides to read Heidi’s hand and the thought of being told her fate frightens her enough to decide to leave without hearing her reading.
She follows her dog out to Apartment 5 and finds herself drawn inside the room. A big red neon cross is glowing on the wall and she raises her hands to it in a trance. A large hairy horned beast appears near her. Then she exits the room.
She envisions a shriveled old naked witch shrieking at her (or us, the camera) to leave them a king. Heidi wakes up from this nightmare startled. She walks her dog later in the day and sits inside a nearby church. A priest talks to her and asks her why she is there, but he also has a few comforting words.
Suddenly he puts his arm around her and forces her face on his crotch. He starts yelling about how she is a prostitute before idols and continues to babble as she fellates him off-screen. Suddenly he coughs up black liquid from his mouth. Heidi wakes up and realizes she just had a nightmare. She runs out of the church, sits outside, smokes a cigarette and cries.
Meanwhile, Francis looks through his books and finds a book entitled The End of the American Witch by A.J. Kennedy. Inside the book there are some copies of the diary of Jonathan Hawthorne’s notes. The notes go into detail about Margaret Morgan, the leader of the witches and how she and her coven of six were burned to death. Part of the notes has some musical notes written and he asks his wife to play them. She does and he notices the notes sound exactly like the music played by The Lords.
He hurries over to have a meeting with Kennedy. They discuss the diary of the Reverend Jon Hawthorne in his book and how he was obsessed with Margaret and her coven of six whom he called “the Lords of Salem”. Hawthorne thought the coven would play the music so as to possess the women of Salem. Eventually he killed Margaret and her coven, but Margaret also cursed Hawthorne. She said that Hawthorne’s bloodline would be the vessel with which the Devil would inherit the Earth.
Meanwhile Heidi feels sick and goes over to Whitey’s house. She suddenly feels sick and starts coughing up blood. She sees three blank-faced doctors who put her on an operating table, cut her open and pull out a bloody wriggling monster.
She’s at home, feeling sick. She takes some medication and sits on the toilet. She feels tortured and goes out. She knocks on a door, pays a man and gets some drugs in return. She sits at home again, taking the drugs and passes out. Then there is a knock at the door and she staggers over to answer it. It’s Lacy and her sisters.
Francis looks up Heidi’s real name. It is Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne and he finds her genealogy records which show that she is a descendant of Rev. Jonathan Hawthorne. Francis tries to call Heidi but is told by Lacy’s sister Megan not to call again.
Lacy and her sisters wheel Heidi down a hall while chanting. They open the door to apartment number 5. Inside the apartment is a large rococo style hall.
Heidi walks into the room and up a flight of stairs which has a landing. At the top of the stairs stands a grotesque creature which shakes and trembles holding umbilical cords which Heidi also holds.
Heidi leaves the room and is tucked into bed by Lacy. Heidi calls Whitey but cannot bring herself to let him worry about her. She refuses to meet up with him before they attend the live Lords show.
Francis goes to Heidi’s home, but is stopped by Lacy who invites him into her home with her sisters. The sisters talk to him and tell him to mind his own business. Sonny then smacks him on the head with a frying pan.
Whitey comes and takes Heidi to the theater but she slips inside without him noticing and closes the door. Inside the theater it is mostly empty save for a few seats filled with women spaced apart.
In the balcony, Heidi sits. As the curtain rises it is revealed that the Lords are Lacy and her sisters, dressed in rags. They call out a prayer for Satan and Margaret appears behind them along with her coven. The Lords music plays and the women in the theater begin to strip off their clothes, including Heidi.
A montage of images flashes and suddenly we see Heidi giving birth surrounded by the witches. She finally gives birth to what looks like a large shrimp.
There is a white light filling the room. The camera pulls back to expose Lacy and her sisters smiling in delight as they look up to see Heidi wearing a crown and golden robes. She stands atop a pile of naked women who appear to be asleep (but are in fact dead).
Some flashback images of Heidi playing with her dog and laughing are seen. Black and white images of the town are shown as the voice of a newscaster plays. He informs the listener that Heidi is missing and that the bodies of the women descendants of the original Salem town are found dead in the theater.
Review:
I had heard that this movie was something new and different from Rob Zombie. That he was bringing something more complex than his past films. I was a little hopeful that the film would be good. Then I talked to a co-worker who had seen the film and had felt it was horrible. I was determined to watch this movie and be neutral. I went in without expectations.
I can say that after viewing this film: Rob Zombie’s wife can’t act. I mean, she tries. I feel like she tries, but she just can’t emote very well. She ends up staggering through the whole film in a daze and doesn’t really build on her character much. This film almost feels just like a showcase piece just to have a film for Rob Zombie to show off his wife. The very first image we see of Heidi her lying naked on the bed with her butt exposed.
This movie has no sense of horror, terror or dread. I could not connect at all to what was happening in this film and there are parts that are pretty laughably bad. The shrimp/prawn baby, the midget in the costume on the stairs, the priests rubbing dildoes, the photoshop melting pictures -all were stupid. It was all really really funny. It basically reminded me of what a 16 year old metalhead me would think was cool. Parts played like a music video and were just choppy without purpose.
The plot is predictable. It’s like Rosemary’s Baby if Polanski threw out the character development and tension and decided to insert a rock video during key scenes.
I would recommend this film only to people who really enjoyed Rob Zombie’s other films. I don’t think anyone else would really get any joy out of this, or horror for that matter.