The first signs of major trouble come when the film introduces us to our lead group of carnival workers, who are in storytelling terms the “heroes,” which I put in air quotes because there’s really nothing all that interesting or heroic about any of the leads in 31. These include Charly (Sheri Moon Zombie), Roscoe (Jeff Daniel Phillips), Panda (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), Venus (Meg Foster), and Levon (Kevin Jackson). It’s made clear early on that the characters all have a familial bond, but none of them are all that likable, smart, or interesting, and the introduction of the group as a whole is so rushed and chaotic that it’s hard to even get a handle on why any of them like each other.
Then later on in the night, the crew members are all captured and kidnapped by a group led sadly by Malcolm McDowell’s Father Murder, who alongside Sister Serpent (Jane Carr) and Sister Dragon (Judy Geeson), spend a majority of the film dressed up as old royal, European aristocrats, talking to each other around a satanic betting table. Once the group are handcuffed and dropped off at Father Murder’s mysterious, scuzzy warehouse, he and his partners tell the group that they have been chosen to participate in “31,” their annual game in which they strand five players in their maze to participate in a game of survival for twelve hours.
In addition to placing them at random points throughout the warehouse as well, the aristocratic psychopaths then send killers of their own choosing after the survivors throughout the twelve hour period. Whoever survives until the end of the time limit, is deemed the winner, even if they don’t really win anything in the end.
Now, if there’s one thing that not even the naysayers of Zombie can deny, it’s the filmmaker’s eye for visual flair in his films, and in 31 he brings the same tentative eye for striking visuals once again. If you’re not a fan of Zombie’s style however, don’t expect to be converted here, since everything does at some point, look like it could just be the artwork for a heavy rock album cover, and this includes a strange dinner table in the warehouse set conveniently next to a bare tree and gothic candles, in which all of the characters are often backlit as silhouettes.
With that being said, it’s hard not to wish that Zombie had paid the same amount of heavy attention that he did to his visuals, as he does to his characters in 31. None of them are interesting, often given dialogue that feels dangerously self-aware, stereotypical, and moronic. The fact that the most interesting acting in the film comes from the murderous hunters killing the lead group, including a grease-painted Richard Brake as Doom-Head, who is undoubtedly the closest thing to a showstealer in the film, says something about Rob Zombie’s take on the horror genre that continues to be a growing problem in all of his projects.
In the end, 31 feels more like a grindhouse video game than it does a fully-functioning and cohesive film, as the survivors are forced to face off with increasingly more odd and dangerous hunters, that basically act as 31’s boss battles. What could have been a tense and gory, single location thriller, instead devolves into a cliche and uninteresting, carnival-themed murder montage. It says a lot that whenever tension does need to be built up in 31, Zombie starts cutting faster and faster, and increases the volume of his music to ungodly high levels. Probably because, there wasn’t that much there to build off of in the first place.