Rob Zombie has a real gift for grime, noise, menace, and the feeling that every room smells bad in a way your soul can detect before your nose does. He can build atmosphere. He can find faces that look haunted before they speak.
He can make America feel diseased. That is why his failures are so frustrating. There is always some version of a great horror filmmaker flickering inside the mess. Then the movies keep collapsing under the same problems: endless screaming, sadism with no modulation, characters flattened into filth and noise, and a weird inability to understand that ugliness is only powerful when it reveals something deeper than contempt for everyone on screen.