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 mins.)
