The Haunted World of El Superbeasto

When it comes to his career as a film director even the most generous of horror film nuts would call Rob Zombie inconsistent. But it's beginning more and more to look like the fun and visceral thrills of The Devil's Rejects were just a fluke. The direct to DVD release of The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is Zombie's first foray into animation, and hopefully it will be his last. Zombie created the comic book the film is based on and directed the flick so it's very easy to lay the blame for this painfully unfunny limp attempt at a shock-fest squarely at his feet.

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto has several colliding story lines going on. El Superbeasto is a masked Mexican wrestler voiced by stand up comic and co-writer of the film Tom Papa. El Superbeasto is a middling celebrity personality who uses that to bag chicks and has an excruciatingly inflated opinion of himself. At a strip club he falls in lust with foul mouthed stripper Velvet Von Black, voiced by Rosario Dawson (Eagle Eye). Meanwhile the villainous yet dorky Dr. Satan, voiced by Paul Giamatti (Fred Clause) is looking for his special unholy bride so he can take over the world. The girl he needs just happens to be Velvet Von Black so he dispatches his gorilla servant Otto, voice by Tom Kenny (TV's Spongebob Squarepants), to bring her back to him. This of course conflicts with El Superbeasto's desire to get busy with Velvet so he goes after her. To try to ensure that he does as little as possible El Superbeasto recruits the help of his sister Suzi X, voiced by Sheri Moon Zombie (Halloween) and her horny robot sidekick Murray, voiced by Brian Posehn (TV's The Sarah Silverman Program). Suzi agrees to help even though she just stole Hitler's living head from zombie Nazis which are now chasing after her. Throw in explosions, mass expletives, a random Hispanic street gang and breasts, breasts and more breasts and you have the finished film.

Rob Zombie has somehow managed to amass a rather impressive voice cast for The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and does absolutely nothing with them. None of the voice performances are really bad (except for that of Sheri Moon Zombie doing one of the most irritating high pitched squeaky voices yet put on film) but none of the actors bring much to the proceedings. Really the work done here could easily have been done by any of the hundreds of voice actors working for scale in Hollywood, it's just wholly unremarkable. The fact that it wasn't just done with voice actors is a little odd frankly, because most of the cast members are big enough to be considered a name but not famous enough to be known for just their voices. Everybody just seems to be trying to be as "cartoony" as possible. One suspects that Zombie just went through his rolodex and got the names he did by promising a quick paycheck for one or two day's work.

Ostensibly The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is a comedy. To call the humor of this film low brow would insulting to low brow comedies everywhere. The film is almost totally devoid of any actual jokes. Zombie and his collaborators seem to be under the impression that there's no need for an actual punchline when they can just show another pair of animated breasts. Apparently in the mind of Zombie a cartoon swearing or jiggling about is inherently hilarious and therefore requires no actual jokes to punch it up. It might have worked if there had been some kind of build up, but the film opens as filthy and gratuitous as it ever gets and just stays that way. The entire film plateaus right from the start. The story is threadbare and bordering on nonsensical (why is Suzi X after Hitler's head anyways?). Sadly it's not nonsensical enough to be surreal or work the comedy of randomness, it's just nonsensical enough to come across as a juvenile disregard for story telling. Juvenile really is probably the word for the film as a whole. It very much feels like something that a 12 year old boy who's been reading the cartoons out of his father's copy of Hustler would come up with. Who needs any kind of purpose when you have apes with boners and a farting stripper?

To be fair there is one redeeming aspect to the monstrosity that is The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, and that is the music. The songs by comedy music duo Hard 'n Phirm manage to bring the only wit and charm that the film has. Songs about the fun of cat fights or how there's an endless supply of bad guys for the chase sequence has a level of self awareness that the rest of the film is sorely lacking. These songs seem to realize how bad the rest of the film is and play with that, whereas everything else seems to be under the delusion that it's insanely funny and it all falls flat.

Ultimately what may be the biggest problem for The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is the simple progress of time. Had this come out 15 or perhaps even 10 years ago it would have been guaranteed at least a sizable cult following, if only because adult aimed animation not originating from Japan was so hard to come by back then. But that was then, now we live in an age where Southpark and Family Guy bring weekly helpings of adult material far more imaginative and genuinely controversial than this could ever hope to be. The makers seemed to hope that the simple novelty of cursing naked cartoons would carry the film. But in a time when surprisingly well reproduced animations of children's cartoon characters getting full on freaky are only a google search away this movie needed something under the surface, anything really. But there's nothing there, just more boobs, and thanks to over exposure those got old 20 minutes in.

Final Score: 1 out of 5