Schlock Therapy
Rob Zombie returns with "The Devil's Rejects," a kill-spree pic on the road to nowhere (Film Review).
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: It's better than House of 1000 Corpses.
The Downside: It still isn't any good.
The scariest thing about The Devil's Rejects is that apparently Rob Zombie wants to be Quentin Tarantino. Between this and his 2003 fright-waste House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie's tried to mix-and-match the video store bargain basement racks of exploitation horror much like Tarantino's done with gangster and blaxploitation movies. Complete with dialogue that tries to be "hip" so bad it wears a neon sign (take a look at an exchange between a pimp named Charlie (Ken Foree) and a local chicken merchant about the carnal uses of poultry) and a 70s golden oldies soundtrack featuring the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Devil's Rejects wants to be all things to all people who worship underground genre movies as a kind of post-modernist form of greatness. However, Rob Zombie is not Quentin Tarantino- but I did I really need to tell you that? Despite its occasional bouts of cleverness, Rejects lacks Tarantino's brand of saber-toothed wit and his vibrant originality (his movies are like a fusion reactor- pieces flung together at phenomenal speeds to create something completely new) and instead settles for being kind of an artless hybrid of Natural Born Killers and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The story starts off in 1978 where the homicidal family from House of 1000 Corpses is run out of town in a hail of gunfire by a vengeful fire and brimstone sheriff named Wydell (William Forsythe). One of the family members is killed and the matriarch, Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook) is arrested, but psychotic Baby (Sheri Moon) and Otis (Bill Moseley) make it out alive and join up with the clown-faced Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) to go on a killing spree for... well, the reasons are beyond me. Devil's Rejects does have some strong advantages over House of 1000 Corpses though, mainly that it loses the feel of a straight-to-video freak show, although the resulting footage from a camcorder accidentally left running for two hours could be an improvement over that stinker, too. Zombie not only seems to switch plotlines between the two films, but there is also an entire change in tone. House was a consummate Creepy Family movie, set mostly at night while Devil's Rejects is a blood-soaked road trip film packed to the gills with images of dilapidated settlements in the middle of the desert and molten heat waves rising off sun-baked road beds. In the process much of the baggage House carried seems to be left behind (for example, what happened to the so-called "Dr. Satan?").
Nevertheless, making a movie that is only slightly better than an awful one is not enough. The Devil's Rejects meanders as it makes its trio of killers run a collision course with Wydell, who is becoming more and more unhinged and out for plain retribution against the family that slaughtered his brother. What Zombie uses to fill up the lag time are repeated moments of sexual torture (the killers kidnap the members of a bluegrass band in an isolated motel), beatings, shootings, and "accidental" deaths that aren't exactly bloodless, but definitely seem scaled back. And what do we get as a reward for subjecting ourselves to this? Nothing. The whole movie is essentially a long marathon of violence and sadomasochistic cruelty that, now drained of House's off-the-deep-end psychosis, mostly turns textureless and painfully dull.
Zombie obviously tries to turn the tables here, turning his precious psychotics into kind of hard-bitten "heroes" in a more extreme mold of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It isn't clear whether or not Zombie wants us to like or dislike these people, and there's no impetus to find out. As they hack their way through innocent bystanders and cops, these characters reveal nothing about themselves to like, but they're also such bland archetypes we don't bother with the energy to hate them, either. It doesn't help that Zombie builds dialogue strands that sometimes rely on variations of the F-word being batted back and forth like a tennis ball for minutes on end. He's managed to turn his entire cast into something not that dissimilar to radio performers- people who don't really act, they're job is to simple repeat what's in the script.
I don't doubt that Zombie obviously loves his horror movies, but unlike Tarantino he's unable to translate that love into a high-octane visual experience that everyone can share. His vision of the movies is grim and depressing rather than boisterous, and it is far more likely to bore anyone before it scares them. If Zombie wants to add a real shock to the system, the best thing he could do is avoid the path of least resistance that includes base slasher movies and try to direct a romantic comedy. Now that would be friggin' scary. D
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