Movie Review The Devil's Rejects

The Devil's Rejects (2005)

Directed by Rob Zombie 

Written by Rob Zombie 

Starring Sid Haig, Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Mosely, Diamond Dallas Page, Danny Trejo

Release Date July 22nd, 2005

Published July 23rd, 2005

Rob Zombie is a talented artist and musician and a very interesting personality. However, in his short career as a filmmaker he has not acquitted himself well. Zombie's House of a Thousand Corpses was about as skillfully directed as a twelve-year-old shooting a Mountain Dew commercial with a handy cam, and his latest effort, the nihilistic serial killer film The Devil's Rejects, shows no improvement. Once again Zombie has committed to film his dark Id, and while there may be something disturbingly fascinating in there, it takes a far more skillful filmmaker than himself to find that and bring it to light.

The Devil's Rejects is not exactly a sequel to House of a Thousand Corpses. Sid Haig, who played the crazed clown Captain Spaulding in House, returns to that role in The Devil's Rejects. Spaulding, with his children Otis (Bill Mosely) and Baby (Sheri Moon), are serial killers who have for years abducted, tortured, and murdered innumerable teenage girls and one dedicated cop. 

That dead cop happens to have been the brother of sheriff Wydell, played by the always sadistic William Forsythe. Not surprisingly, capturing the captain and his clan is a crusade for Sheriff Wydell, who will do anything inside or outside the law to get them. His methods include hiring a pair of sick, twisted, biker bounty hunters (Danny Trejo and Diamond Dallas Page) to hunt the family down and kill anyone who gets in the way of their capture.

The above description amounts to a semblance of a plot but it's not what The Devil's Rejects is about. Rather, the film is about just how twisted and disturbing Zombie can be in presenting violence and gore. In what could have been an interesting break in form, The Devil's Rejects never bothers to establish a connection with the audience through a heroic character. Instead, the audience is forced to witness everything from the perspective of these deplorable murderers. This could be an interesting challenge but it is a failure in execution.

There has to have been a central idea to The Devil's Rejects, something Zombie was attempting to say or demonstrate with these characters but I could not find it. In the end, The Devil's Rejects is pointless, like watching Rob Zombie's twisted imagination come to life. It's an insight into his mind that leaves you feeling that he should seek counseling rather than committing his disturbing fantasies to film for the whole world to see.

In the horror genre you can get away with a lot of sick and twisted stuff in an attempt to frighten audiences. But there is a limit to what even the most forgiving horror fan can take. The Devil's Rejects surpasses that limit by not merely being sadistic but by glorifying sadism. The film is a love letter to the murderous behavior of its sick characters.

A scene where a group of touring musicians is taken hostage in a motel room is used as an opportunity for Zombie to lovingly capture the near naked form of his wife, Sherry Moon, as she goes through the titillating motions of humiliating a female captive. The slow deaths of each of the musicians is a pointless exercise in gore for the sake of gore. This is not typical horror movie gore, with a wink and a nod. No, Zombie takes a nearly verite approach to the violence of these scenes and seeks to tap the twisted excitement someone might find in a snuff film.

Zombie revels in these characters' violent sexual assaults and cruel murders as if they were poetic misunderstood outlaws just out for a good time. The influence of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers can be felt throughout, but where Stone was at least experimenting in form while exercising his sick and twisted side, Zombie lacks the talent and imagination to mix his horror with artful filmmaking. That is not to forgive Natural Born Killers which I also did not care for, but it's certainly better than the mess that is The Devil's Rejects.

The Devil's Rejects is experimental in that it has no point beyond its graphic violence, but it's an experiment with no real results. What should we take away from this film other than the idea that Rob Zombie lives in a very dark place?

Movie Review Machete

Machete (2010) 

Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Written by Robert Rodriguez

Starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan

Release Date September 3rd, 2010 

Published September 4th, 2010

“Machete” is a film that is impervious to criticism. One cannot critique the filmmaking; it's supposed to be grungy and low budget to evoke its 70's influences. One cannot critique the acting, everyone in the film is supposed to be over the top and utterly ludicrous to match the unfortunate amateurs who played these roles back in the original Grindhouse days. You cannot criticize the storyline because really, what story is there? And since you are not supposed to treat any of this with seriousness as that would undermine the audacious, humorous homage to trash, one really can’t then take seriously anything in the film's take on the immigration issue?

“Machete” is basically Robert Rodriguez masturbating on screen. Yes, masturbation seems to be the foremost concern of “Machete” or rather director Robert Rodriguez who puts his deepest carnal desires on screen, revealing himself in both brave and disturbing fashion. Like his cohorts Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez gets off on guns and blood but unlike Roth and with slightly less awe than Tarantino, Rodriguez throws a few near naked girls in the mix.

Is it strange to watch a grown man put his teenage boy sex fantasies on screen? Oh yeah, a big part of me has absolutely no want to know what it is that gets Robert Rodriguez off. But, there is also a part of me that is sickly entertained because some of his fantasies, Ms. Alba in particular, are my fantasies as well. I, however, do not get off on violence the way Rodriguez does. I don't mind the skillful demonstration of violence on screen but the ways in which Rodriguez and his man/boy directing brethren enjoy the violence is disturbing and makes me worry a little for their collective mental health.

In a review of “Hostel” for another website years ago I wondered; if Eli Roth were not a filmmaker capable of demonstrating his sickest fantasies on screen would he have become a serial murderer? I have the same concerns with Mr. Rodriguez after watching “Machete” but to a slightly lesser extent.

The difference between the two is Rodriguez has an interest in women, even if only a puerile one, Mr. Roth only seems to enjoy torture, maiming and death. Dragging their mentor Mr. Tarantino into this conversation is unnecessary, his interest seems to be purely cinema and what his camera's eye is capable of, what the camera captures serves a very particular and highly cinematic vision. Rodriguez and Roth are teenage boys using the camera as a masturbatory device for their incurable twisted fantasies.

“Machete” boils down to a demonstration of what 13 year old Robert Rodriguez found on a VHS tape years ago and got off to. Whether it was Gordon Parks or Melvin Van Peebles, William Girdler (look him up, I did) or Arthur Marx, Rodriguez found tapes of Foxy Brown or Sweet Sweetback or Shaft and it got him off. Now he’s making the movies that get him off.

I’m not a prude, I have the same male urge for self gratification that every other red blooded American male has. I merely prefer to confine my fantasies to my bedroom. Mr. Rodriguez places his fantasies in giant multiplex theaters and I find that awkward and disturbing.

I mean, if this were a true homage to Grindhouse, one would have to stumble upon it in some woebegone, out of the way second hand shop. Not in the gleaming, popcorn scented world in which the theater next door is showing Toy Story 3. “Machete” belongs on a store shelf next to Faster Pussycat Kill Kill or anything by Herschel Gordon Lewis. There it could be discovered and passed around from friend to friend.

That’s my issue, that’s what has been nagging at me about “Machete.” Treating this like any other major movie release just feels wrong. It’s supposed to be underground where some teenager can dust it off, slip into his jacket pocket and steal it out of the store while the manager is helping a customer buy porn.

The kid should sneak “Machete” home, wait for his parents to go to bed and slip it in and enjoy it as it should be enjoyed. The next day he takes it to school and passes it from friend to friend until one of them gets caught with it and it spends the next decade in a school filing cabinet waiting to be rediscovered or sold at some teacher’s garage sale.

Placing “Machete” in theater taints the true experience. The bloody, gory, twisted violence, the childish over the top sex, simply does not belong in the same building where Jennifer Aniston is starring in The Switch. The milieu degrades and depraves the experience and makes “Machete” impossible to enjoy without feeling more than a little creepy and weird.