The Devil's Rejects Review
by Rick Ferguson (filmgeek65 AT hotmail DOT com)August 17th, 2005
I'm not a Rob Zombie fan, per se, but I am an admirer. Zombie (aka Robert Cummings) is a great American success story. A self-made renaissance man who began his career as a musician fronting the 90's thrash-metal outfit White Zombie (named after a Bela Lugosi film, naturally), he transformed himself into a living comic book character- a dreadlocked undead superhero as envisioned by Boris Vallejo with a bevy of big-titted babes at his feet and a guitar at his side. Zombie wasn't just the bandleader; he also drew the covers for his CDs, directed the videos, wrote the complementary comic books and even designed his own tattoos, which he wears. He's performed with childhood heroes Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. His music was never original or compelling, just loud and omnipresent, which makes him living proof that talent is the least essential ingredient of success. What really counts is moxie, a little luck and a lot of good old-fashioned elbow grease.
It was only a matter of time before Zombie moved to films. Move he did in 2002, when he convinced Universal to finance his dream project, an homage to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre he called HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES. When Universal saw the finished product, they deemed it unreleasable, which prompted Zombie to take it to the we'll-release-anything guys over at Lions Gate Films. The resulting film was a Frankenstein's monster of sewn-together parts from other, better horror films. But it did reveal that Zombie had a vision, of sorts- to bring back the era of 1970's exploitation horror that included such nihilist classics as THE HILLS HAVE EYES and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. It's not exactly the noble pursuit of a lofty artistic ideal, but at least Zombie believes in what he's selling.
THE DEVIL'S REJECTS picks up where 1,000 CORPSES left off- in the questionable company of the Firefly family, the most lovable clan of lunatic hillbilly serial killers you're ever likely to meet. There's Otis (Bill Moseley), the stringy blond-haired leader of the tribe who's fond of cuddling with decomposing corpses; Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), the murderous succubus who splits her time between shaking her ass and wielding a butcher knife; Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook, subbing for Karen Black), the homicidal clan matriarch; and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), the evil clown whose scariest feature is his set of rotting teeth. That all the main characters are named after Groucho Marx characters is supposed to stand for irony.
The film begins with a police raid on the Firefly homestead. After a somewhat truncated shootout, Mother Firefly ends up in custody, while the rest of the family ends up on the run. In hot pursuit is Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), out for revenge after the Fireflys murdered his brother in the first film. Can Wydell track down the Fireflys and give them a taste of their own medicine before the trail of fresh corpses grows too long?
Let's get one thing straight: unless you're a 14 year-old boy whose idea of entertainment is shooting hookers in the head while playing Grand Theft Auto, there's no "enjoying" this film. There's nothing in it to enjoy. Zombie's aim is to make you squirm, and squirm you will at the lovingly executed scenes of murder, dismemberment and behavior so degrading that it leaves you hoping a super-virus will come along and wipe us all off the planet. There are no heroes to root for; Sheriff Wydell, unsurprisingly, proves as twisted a sadist as his prey. Your choices are to succumb to the vicarious thrill of indulging in the Devil's work, try to remain a detached observer, or walk out of the theater.
Me, I chose the detached observer route. I noted that Zombie seems determined to improve as a filmmaker. 1,000 CORPSES revealed the director as a funhouse version of Oliver Stone in his NATURAL BORN KILLERS period, with rotating film stocks, grainy video footage and half-baked delusions of grandeur subbing for artistic discipline. Rejects, by contrast, mostly carries a singular aesthetic throughout- in this case, the 70's criminals-on-the-lam picture. Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino covered this same ground in FROM DUSK 'TIL DAWN. But whereas they aimed to send up the genre, Zombie aims to resurrect it.
To hone his point, he fills the frame with cameos by long lost B-movie actors from the 70's: DAWN OF THE DEAD's Ken Foree, HALLOWEEN's P.J. Soles, professional pinhead Michael Berryman from THE HILLS HAVE EYES, TV veteran Priscilla Barnes, former Clint Eastwood sidekick Geoffrey Lewis, and even porn star Ginger Lynn Allen. There must be a warehouse somewhere in West Hollywood where they store all these has-been actors until some director gets a hair up his ass to use them. He also delves deep into the 70's songbook with liberal doses of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvin Bishop, The James Gang, Steely Dan and The Allman Brothers. Even the opening credits are straight out of a drive-in double feature.
All this is by way of Mr. Zombie telling us that he's serious about his art. That Zombie is indulging his dark muse at the same time he's hustling a buck is, perhaps, commendable. But even if you have a taste for this sort of thing, there's not a lot of meat on this skeleton. He lingers with lugubrious excess over the scenes of torture and humiliation, but there's never a sense that the film is becoming anything greater than what it is: a marginally well-executed snuff film. Contrast it with a truly horrifying treatise on the depravity of evil like HENRY, PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, and this film comes off like amateur hour. It's not Zombie's subject matter that ultimately dooms him; it's his lack of depth. He seems more interested in creating characters that will make good McFarland Toys action figures than he is in making a film that will last.
But as I said, I'm an admirer. Zombie's ambition and flare for self-promotion have gotten him this far. He may yet have a great horror film in him. After all, a guy who loves comic books, Bela Lugosi and Alice Cooper can't be all bad.
***
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