El Superbeasto (1999)
Release Date: September 22, 2009
Directed By: Rob Zombie
Cast: Tom Papa, Rosario Dawson, Brian Posehn, Paul Giamatti, Sheri Moon Zombie,
Review By: Marc Patterson

El Superbeasto is a zany and outlandish story set in an even more bizarre universe where sideshow freaks and all sorts of supernatural ghouls and creatures co-exist. Enter El Superbeasto, a pretentious and arrogant Luchador who runs a sleaze-o-rama film company BeastoWorld Enterprises. When mad scientist, all around evil genius Dr. Satan (Paul Giamatti) kidnaps Superbeasto’s main squeeze Velvet Von Black it falls upon Superbeasto to rescue his damsel in distress. To assist him he enlists the aid of his bootilicious sister, Suzi X (Sheri Moon Zombie) who takes a break from her escapades, which include battling hordes of Nazi Zombies, in order to storm down the castle of Dr. Satan and win the day.

El Superbeasto is a 2D misadventure of epic scale that is based upon Rob Zombie’s comic book series (a comic series that actually isn’t half bad) and that has been years in the making. Well, let’s just say the process of getting this film distributed to the masses has been the major delay, not the actual making of the film.

Beyond the basic plot outline above it’s not really clear what this film is about and to be honest I couldn’t give a damn. The story is convoluted and all over the place. Zombie attempts to pack in so many bizarre elements that he forgets about the fact that a coherent story is actually a good thing. But we’ve come to expect that of Zombie, haven’t we? Of course I didn’t come into the film with any level of high expectations, but somehow El Superbeasto managed to not only lower my expectations, but also destroy the line of what lowered expectations should be.

Most disgusting is that within five minutes it’s obvious that El Superbeasto could have been written by the raging hormones of a thirteen-year-old boy. Hey, I’m one all for gratuitous nudity and exploitation but this film takes the low road and wears an aged joke out over and over again. It’s just not funny. Even the rare moments that should have been funny were offset by over the top stupidity that dominates this film from the beginning to the end. But bad humor is the only flat thing in the film. For the love of all that is decent, one can only take so many cartoon shots of DD boobies. And folks, I love boobies, but this is ri-fuckin-diculous. There is more bare-breasted cartoon cleavage on display than you can shake a horndogs hard-on at.

One could feasibly defend the film by saying that it is intentionally supposed to be over the top, and that it’s supposed to break all limits of good taste. Sure, the catchy theme songs and copious amounts of pop culture references make for a mild upside to an otherwise exercise in cinematic stupidity. But in my mind that is like saying Budweiser makes good beer because they use the same ingredients as everyone else. Fact is, Budweiser tastes like stale piss and should be treated as such.

I’ve come to the distinct conclusion that Rob Zombie makes good music, not good films. I’d rather watch a Uwe Boll film ten times rather than suffer through any Rob Zombie’s messes. El Superbeasto is repetitively vulgar, obscene, and an obnoxious waste of time and talent for the actors involved and is reprehensible and an affront to filmmaking. I plainly expect Rob Zombie to produce shitty films. This one however lowers the bar far beyond anything I could have imagined. I hope to wash this from my memory as soon as humanly possible.

For those of you who don’t give a damn about my opinion of Rob Zombie’s ineptitude at filmmaking I’ll push you to at least consider the Blu-ray version of the film, which is what I watched. The standard DVD comes with nominal extras and is pretty “Plain Jane”. With the Blu-ray version there are at least some added features, and damn it, but if you’re going to watch 80 minutes of adolescent hijinks, you might as well have the best picture and sound possible.

Brutal As Hell Rating: 1 out of 5