The Devil's Rejects

Rob Zombie clearly loves 70's grindhouse films. And not just their grisly love of violent mayhem and fascination with rage and depravity. He has internalized their visual style, their gritty sense of atmosphere, their washed-out cinematography, their amoral, fatalistic mindset. Everything in Devil's Rejects feels right, feels authentic to the period and the style Zombie's recalling.

Some quick background: In the days before Times Square was a haven of Disney-themed family fun, it used to house a lot of skeezy porno theaters. Some of these 42nd Street theaters, during the week, when they weren't showing porn, would show the 1970's equivalent of direct-to-DVD B-movies...Dirty, shocking, perverse or otherwise "inappropriate" movies made on the cheap. Guys like Harry Novak, Jess Franco and Bob Cresse have since become cult legends, but at the time it was about making a quick dollar churning out disposable, titilating cinematic trash.

Zombie's new film doesn't just recall these movies, it recreates them down to every last exacting detail. (The movie even takes place in 1978).

But what's his purpose? What is revisiting the grindhouse gorefests of the 70's supposed to mean? I suspect, nothing at all. Zombie probably just likes these kinds of movies and wanted to make one of his own. That's fine, I suppose, to create a pastiche of conventions from an all-but-dead style of filmmaking. It's an excuse to get a bunch of old actors together, which is always fun, and the genre is certainly appropriate to Zombie's taste for the perverse. The entire enterprise, though, is a bit hollow.

The original grindhouse films were the way they were for a reason. They were made by amateurs with no time to make a movie and no real financing. They needed to be shocking in order to grab people's attention, and to provide a genuine alternative to Hollywood product. If you wanted to see a film about a beautiful woman dying of a terminal disease, you could go see Love Story. You only went to Times Square to see the sort of fucked up shit Hollywood doesn't put in real movies.



In his debut film, House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie gave us yet another in a long line of bad Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes, stranding a bunch of random idiots in a farmhouse and turning some psychos loose on them. There was some controversy upon the film's original release, more I suspect for its unseemly atmosphere than its actual on-screen violence, but it was nothing that a low-budget horror movie fan hadn't seen before. That entire film, really, was nothing more than a tired retread.

The Devil's Rejects, by moving the action away from the farmhouse and on to the open road, gives Zombie a lot more to work with. More space, more characters, a wider variety of classic exploitation movie scenarios to play around with. More than just a violent horror film, Devil's Rejects is an ode to the "killers on the run" genre, a reunion of B-movie actors of the 70's and 80's and a pretty horrifying revenge film to boot. It's a far more confident and assured film than his debut. In fact, the attention to detail, the confident direction and the wonderful cinematography of Phil Parmet are light years ahead of 1000 Corpses. They are the marks of an interesting filmmaker who may just need a few more films to really figure out what it is he wants to say.

But this movie's content to serve as nostalgia, albeit nostalgia for a certain type of filmgoer who likes really intensely messed up, violent, gruesome, cruel stories about death and depravity.

As the film opens, hard-ass Sheriff Wydell (veteran character actor William Forsythe) has laid seige to the compound of the family of Satanaic nutcases who populated House of 1000 Corpses. Some family members are killed or captured, but a few escape, including insane clown Captain Spaulding (70's B-movie mainstay Sid Haig), his daughter Baby (Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon) and Charlie Manson lookalike Otis (Bill Moseley, a veteran of mainly films with names like Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!).

Together, they flee the scene, leaving in their wake a trail of massacred bodies and tormented victims. Nearly everyone they encounter on their travels has some kind of pop culture cachet...There's indie comic Brian Posehn as an oafish roadie, 70's Penthouse Pet Priscilla Barnes as a hostage who is violently and sexually assaulted by the sadistic Otis, Western mainstay Geoffrey Lewis as a country singer, Robert Rodriguez featured player Danny Trejo as a hired gun, the late "tallest man alive" Matthew McGrory (who also appeared in Tim Burton's Big Fish) appears briefly, Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree as a backwoods pimp and even Halloween vet PJ Soles as a woman who gets carjacked.

It's fun to play Spot That Reference for a while, but by the halfway point it starts to feel like a gimmick. Casting an old-time actor or an infamous face doesn't have to be a stunt, if they are right for the role, but it kind of takes away from the effect when every single part goes to some known personality. That's what sets apart a John Waters camp-fest from a more thoughtful homage.

Zombie, to his credit, understands that it's not the on-screen violence that gives these grindhouse films their power to repulse, horrify, amuse and shock - it's their constant focus on nihilistic cruelty. The Devil's Rejects isn't a fun movie with a few scattered scenes of horror. It's a non-stop celebration of carnage, torture and bloodshed. Its main characters (including Forsythe's maniacal cop) are soulless killing machines. Even their victims aren't really allowed any humanity or life. They are puppets to be manipulated, humiliated and then eviscerated.

I know I'm making the movie sound disgusting and fairly repulsive. You don't know the half of it. As I said before, Zombie has internalized the twisted logic of these movies, and even if his choice of topic isn't exactly innovative, he has come up with some moments of genuinely outrageous, ugly intensity and surprise. I'll spoil one sequence...An unfortunate young woman (Kate Norby) runs out into the middle of a highway, half-insane, wearing a mask made from the peeled-off face of her dead husband, and is hit by a big rig.

Zombie lovingly photographs the aftermath, the most hideous intestine, bone and brain-filled skidmark imaginable. I have seen a number of incredibly violent movies, but this shot elicited a loud, verbal reaction from me. That's saying something.

And I do mean "lovingly." The entire movie has the feeling of a labor of love, the culmination of a lifetime spent watching gross-out, underground cinema. And I don't necessarily want to come down on that. I had a good time being disturbed by Devil's Rejects. But I'm not one of those people inclined to like a filmmaker just because we clearly share the same tastes in films. Quentin Tarantino, in the Kill Bill movies and his other films, has demonstrated an ability to reimagine old forms of cult storytelling for our times. His movies make old forgotten 70's style and music feel essential and contemporary.

Zombie hasn't quite gotten that far. His final shot, in which The Rejects face their law enforcement persuers head-on to the sounds of Lynard Skynard's "Freebird" on the soundtrack, works as a nifty little post-modern moment, as irony. And it's a very well-shot sequence. But it's not exactly Pulp Fiction, colliding the past and the future into a single film and giving it a timeless quality. More an engaging, debased in-joke that hardcore movie nerds will appreciate. Fortunately, I am one of those nerds.