Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a negative review of Rob Zombie's sophomore flick, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS... however this negative review could be read as a glowingly positive one considering that the below reviewer hates the film for identifying with the evil villainous main characters. I personally think Sid Haig and his group were the only truly successful and interesting thing about HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES. I am, personally, psyched to see this film, but then again I'm morally repugnant, so... Take it for ballast, squirts! Enjoy the review!
As the end credits began to roll on THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, writer/director Rob Zombie's follow-up to his HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, my friend turned to me and asked what I thought of the film we had just seen.
"It's a piece of shit," I shrugged. "A torture show."
I stand by my first impression. It is a piece of shit and it is a torture show. But why? Why did Rob Zombie, who has built several successful careers out of his passion for the horror and exploitation genres, miss his mark so badly? And why does everyone who tries to create some kind of homage to seventies exploitation films – movies that were usually slapped together under rushed and less than ideal circumstances - fail with ten times the resources at their disposal?
I should begin by saying that if nothing else, Rob Zombie has made a superior film to HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES. The most succinct criticism of HOUSE that I heard was from a friend who said she felt like she spent the whole movie waiting for it to begin, then was disappointed when it never really did; the mish-mash of gimmicks, gags and gross-outs failed to gel into anything cohesive or meaningful. And like a lot of 'everything-PLUS-the-kitchen-sink' experiences, at the end of the day not only did it not make a lot of sense, it just wasn't very good.
THE DEVIL'S REJECTS continues the adventures of the murderously unhinged Firefly family first introduced in HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES – played by Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie (aka Mrs. Rob Zombie), Leslie Easterbrook (pinch-hitting for Karen Black) and cult favorite Sid Haig. In addition, Howard Stern regular Matthew McGrory returns to make what is a bit too convenient a cameo appearance as brother Tiny.
It's essentially a road movie with two major detours; the first takes the band of killers to a desert motel where they torment, torture and ultimately murder a family they meet there, while the second occurs in a western-themed bordello where the Firefly clan are confronted by their arch-nemesis: a lawman (William Forsythe) whose brother they murdered in the previous film.
Whatever negative things can be said about the THE DEVIL'S REJECTS – and there are plenty – it does have real forward momentum, an actual plot and a consistent and frequently arresting visual style. Unfortunately, it's all in the service of a film that is crude and sniggering at its best then cynical and downright offensive at its worst. It's the cinematic equivalent of the tasteless drunk at a party who starts out entertainingly enough but soon ruins everyone's good time to the point where folks start wondering just when he's going to get taken outside and have his ass beaten for him.
And that's depressing on a number of levels. It's depressing because some of the technical efforts to re-create the look and texture of the gritty exploitation movies of thirty years ago come so close to working. It's depressing because the movie features several very good performances by some talented and interesting actors who continue to be criminally overlooked and underused by Hollywood (Sid Haig, Ken Foree, Geoffrey Lewis, and William Forsythe, to name a few). It's depressing because it's yet another genre movie in which torture, rape, violence and humiliation are presented in as graphic and unforgiving a manner as possible and then later employed as cheap punchlines. But mostly it's depressing because Rob Zombie was, by his own account, given free reign to do anything he wanted for this movie and this was the best he could come up with.
For his second feature, Zombie turned to the notorious drive-in fare of the seventies for inspiration - a school of film hardly known for its political correctness. Plenty of those movies came under fire upon their initial release and would likely find no warmer a welcome were they to be released today.
And yet, unlike THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, even in the worst of the drive-in trash there is almost always some kind of moral code in play, at least on some level. Good versus Evil is the most basic dramatic conflict we as humans have; you can play it straight or you can play it loose, but when you choose not to play at all you tend to end up with something less than compelling. THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is proof of it.
It's practically a rule that exploitation movies have 'anti-heroes' as protagonists, and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS attempts to follow in that tradition by putting its family of killers center stage. But Zombie lacks a grasp of the essential components required to create that kind of character with any degree of effectiveness. An anti-hero may not represent conventional, cut-and-dried concepts of heroism, but they have to stand for something; otherwise, what's the point?
Zombie has created a singularly remorseless and unpleasant cast of characters (they don't even appear to like each other very much!), but no one here is written with any real dimension or depth. They aren't helped by the dialogue, which is comprised entirely of sick-joke verbal showboating, campy pop-culture references or some combination of the two. The end result makes for one or two clever exchanges but mostly it just calls attention to itself. It's safe to say any art or interest found in the characters can be attributed solely to the contributions of the actors themselves, since their performances are pretty much all their characters have got going for them. Old-school exploitation vets like Haig, Lewis and Forsythe have all done more with less in the past, and though they could probably play these roles in their sleep and still walk away with the movie, all three deliver such energetic and even nuanced work, you can't help but wish the filmmaker shared their level of commitment.
Perhaps most annoyingly, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS – even more so than the campier HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES - plays into a trend that has been ruining horror movies for several decades: the idolization of the monster. With the emergence of sequels, T-shirts, toys and Halloween costumes tied to mainstream horror, characters who were once figures of fear have been transformed into bizarre and unlikely cult heroes.
This is different from the long-idolized 'classic' monsters like Chaney's Phantom, the Wolfman, Im Ho Tep or even King Kong. A closer look at that rogues' gallery reveals a common underlying humanity, a pathos to their respective situations that makes them deserving of a certain empathy despite their monstrous behavior. Is this same level of sentiment really appropriate to contemporary movie monsters who, by and large, are merciless, one-dimensional wisecracking serial rapists and killers?
Too many hardcore genre fans – and sadly, Rob Zombie must be counted among them – fail to grasp the essence of what drew them to the genre in the first place: namely, the thrill of being scared by a monster, not the thrill of being one. It is precisely this confusion that lies at the root of the embarrassing glut of truly horrible horror movies of the last thirty years.
Let's be clear: 'Leatherface' was not the hero of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Mars, Pluto and Jupiter were not the heroes of THE HILLS HAVE EYES. The murderous cult members are not the heroes of RACE WITH THE DEVIL. They were the villains. We aren't meant to identify with them. Their brutish behavior is completely alien to what we know and accept as appropriate. We don't understand them, and we certainly shouldn't be able to relate to them. That's what makes them scary.
Zombie misses this point entirely, establishing a cast of characters whose behavior is beyond reprehensible, then puts a few dirty jokes into their mouths as if to say 'aw hell, they ain't all that bad.' But when characters are shown beating, mutilating, raping and killing innocent passersby, they are that bad, and for Zombie to present them as anything less – to say nothing of suggesting these people are the heroes of the piece - moves his film out of simple pseudo-hip bad taste and into the realm of the truly offensive.
If the introduction of issues of taste and morality seems out of place in a discussion of an exploitation film, it shouldn't. A truly effective piece of exploitation should carry with it a very profound understanding of existing standards of decency, of prevailing public tastes and mores; how can the filmmakers possibly hope to capitalize and ( ahem!) exploit their audience's worst fears otherwise? It's about knowing where the audience will draw the line and then elbowing them sharply over it - enough to get under their skin. The exploitation filmmaker who fails to grasp this basic concept is in the wrong line of work.
Even a movie as brutal and nihilistic in its attitudes as Al Adamson's biker trash classic SATAN'S SADISTS at least allows for some kind of moral center. Traditional morality may not necessarily be respected by a film's characters, and certainly it doesn't even have to triumph over Evil, but the acknowledgement of a moral standard – whether it is being enforced or violated – is crucial. It forms the defining point for any character and, by extension, the film itself. It's also what makes an audience able to relate to the film, and it's the only thing that keeps the best of the exploitation films from slipping into a muck of numbing, pointless sadism.
The original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is a savage, unforgiving film, but it is also a masterpiece. It is effective not because the forces of good are presented as essentially powerless against the casual evil depicted onscreen, but rather because the villains of the piece don't even appear to comprehend the difference. Think about it: what could be more terrifying to anyone in civilized society than the idea that there are people out there who exist in such a state of complete moral ignorance that the rules of your society don't even apply to them. Their ambivalence, combined with their mystery, makes them terrifying.
By assigning his evil characters attributes the viewer can relate to (or even be entertained by!) such as a gift for gallows-humor wisecracks or a sympathetic music score, a director not only weakens the characters by scaling them down from their more elemental proportions but he weakens the audience, numbing them to the terrors he may have in store for them. Aside from creative laziness (it's done because it's become the norm in these kinds of films) or crass marketing agendas (it makes the characters easier to popularize and franchise), can there be any legitimate artistic motivation for encouraging an audience to like or even admire vicious, sadistic characters to the point where their viciousness and sadism are celebrated and applauded? In THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, the audience is encouraged to cheer two men savagely beaten to death with a club, another man's head twisted until his neck snaps and a woman mowed down by an eighteen wheeler then dragged along a stretch of road. It is worth noting that these characters whose grisly ends prove so satisfying are all presented earlier in the film as likable, innocent victims !
Contrast this approach with the finale he orchestrates for the three murderers. When Zombie puts his family of psychos into an outnumbered, outgunned showdown on a lonely stretch of highway, underscored by the nostalgic, mournful wail of Lyrnyrd Skynyrd's 'Freebird' on the soundtrack like some kind of white-trash BUTCH CASSIDY, what exactly is he saying? Is his point that we should consider the deaths of three remorseless serial killers as somehow tragic because they were only trying to be "free"? Can he possibly believe that line of bullshit?
When a filmmaker chooses to set his scene in an amoral no-man's land where psychotic killers are cast as heroes and their victims are no more than objects of ridicule and target practice, he robs the viewer of any sense of perspective and places his film in the genre equivalent of porn. And like porn, it becomes all about the audience waiting to see the next character get fucked.
With THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, Rob Zombie creates a world that turns on dysfunction and cruelty, but sadly there is no method to his madness.
I am g. speedlace, attorney at law
