It’s an inauspicious return to the storyline that made his name as a filmmaker. Jason Blum funded his 2012 film "Lords of Salem" on a lark while writing checks to a dozen other horror auteurs after the sudden success of "Paranormal Activity," then Zombie had to crowdfund his carney horror "31," and now three years later here’s "3 from Hell," shown as a Fathom Event like a religious service or an opera performance that seems to have been shot whenever his cast of character actors had a spare minute. The great Austin Stoker has a cameo as a newsreader in the very beginning, Danny Trejo appears for a matter of seconds and the legendary Sid Haig, currently fighting for his life in an ICU after an accident, only has about ten minutes of screen time. It’s the first Rob Zombie movie that feels as subversive in its logistics as in its violence since "House of 1,000 Corpses." The world doesn’t seem to want Zombie to make his art, at least not with his full range of resources, but there’s no keeping him down. Every hobbling he receives from the world of film financing and distribution he makes into a kind of slick strength.

When last we saw "The Devil’s Rejects," the trio of sadists who tore through his first two films, they were being gunned down by sheriff’s deputies in a convertible while “Free Bird“ wailed on the soundtrack. In order to make the latest chapter in their saga, Zombie has to literally resurrect them. Captain Spaulding (Haig) succumbs to health troubles a few years into his life sentence, but not before delivering one of Zombie’s best monologues. Otis (Bill Moseley) has his sights set on escape and has enlisted his cousin Winslow Foxworth Coltrane (Richard Brake, our Timothy Carey) in his attempt. Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) is shaking up her wing of the prison in high style. A butch guard (Dee Wallace) has made it her mission to break Baby no matter the means. The warden of the prison housing the rejects (Jeff Daniel Phillips, just loving life as a weasel) starts sweating after Otis’ break out because he knows he’ll be coming back for Baby and it’s only a matter of how. When he returns home from work one evening and finds his wife held captive by Otis and Foxy, he knows he’s about to fall hard. He’s gonna to have to release Baby if he wants to get out with his life, and then it’s just a matter of how three murderous fugitives from justice lay low with the world on the lookout for them.

"3 from Hell" is a few different movies in one, starting as a lovingly crafted '70s cable news cycle as Zombie catches the audience up on things so far. Then it becomes a Susan Hayward prison movie with Baby squaring off against the warden, allowing Dee Wallace to play a rare villain with visible relish. Baby breaks her nose and she spends the rest of her screen time with Jack Nicholson’s facial bandage from "Chinatown," staring with deranged focus from behind the gauze. The hostage situation seems to deliberately ape Robert Endelson’s "Fight For Your Life," one of the more obscure video nasties. Brake and Moseley get to settle into their characters holding the Warden’s family and friends hostage. Once the trio hits the road, the film becomes Zombie’s riff on Sam Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch" and its first cover version Walter Hill’s "Extreme Prejudice." Each of these sections only suffers by dint of being too short, almost like Zombie’s crafted a stylistic omnibus and filled in the why’s later. It’s intoxicating seeing him trying out so many moods and modes, powered purely by the sadistic glee his cast brings to their roles.