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?
