Shared Darkness

As Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot gets further into the swing of production, I figured it would be time to get some stuff up and posted on his work; ergo this review of his last film, The Devil’s Rejects, redacted and tweaked from its original publication in Screen International.

A lot of horror movies self-profess to be brutal and out-there, but most modern genre pictures actually reveal themselves to be little more than communal vehicles of squeamish discomfort, because in the final analysis and in the pursuit of as many pan-demographic dollars as possible, they don’t really want to cross the line into flat-out perversion and wantonness.

Writer-director Rob Zombie’s wide-eyed, merrily depraved The Devil’s Rejects, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Refusing to cater or pander to a younger horror audience weaned on the teen-centric slasher flicks of the past half decade, the movie is unapologetically degenerate in just about every form and fashion. This means a film-going experience that is at times borderline unwatchable, but — and here’s the key — unwatchable on its own terms.



The Devil’s Rejects is a sequel of sorts to Zombie’s directorial debut House of 1,000 Corpses — though that 2003 film was such a bust and critical piñata that its ties are being smartly downplayed — in that it follows some of the same depraved characters as they escape a raid on their isolated country house and set off on the road, cutting a bloody swathe of scattershot retribution. Set in 1978 to a countrified soundtrack (including Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, Muddy Waters and Terry Reid), the film centers around a murderous clan of hillbillies who are chased from their torture-dungeon home and take hostages on their attempted flight to freedom. Demented matriarch Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook) is captured by Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe) and his deputies in said raid, but Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s wife) and her white-haired brother Otis (Bill Moseley) escape and meet up with their equally psychotic father, the clown-makeup-smeared Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig). While the Fireflys hole up with pimp and small-time drug peddler Charlie Altamont (Ken Foree), Wydell eventually enlists the assistance of two unsavory bounty hunters to deal with the murderers outside the official parameters of the law.

For all its lack of nuance, and the unpleasantness that its unnerving sadism conjures forth, The Devil’s Rejects is definitely of a piece with exploitation movies of the ilk and era for which it’s aiming. Wydell is an irascible figure, the type of lawman-pushed-too-far character you would expect to see Lee Marvin playing a couple generations ago, and Zombie brings a skeezy lasciviousness (freeze frames on violent beatings, macabre attempts at humor, psychological torture to match the physical brutality) to the entire affair. Overwrought performances and a maniacal B-movie energy cap off what is an artful and graphic if wholly unoriginal to-scale rendering of exploitation cinema.

Cinematographer Phil Parmet, too, brings a grubby effectiveness to the proceedings. Shot entirely on location in the California desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale, The Devil’s Rejects exudes a dusty, bleak palette that is in mortal lock-step with the desolation and desperation of the narrative.

All in all, The Devil’s Rejects unnerves more than just about any other picture of the year, so pervasive is its sense of disgust and dread. These qualities mark it as certainly different from much of its modern cinematic brethren, though they won’t necessarily make it good for most audiences. (LionsGate, R, 108 minutes)