08/01/2005 1:51 PM
Posted by VeggieSteph

The Devils Rejects starring Sid Haig, Sherri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe, Bill Moseley

I have been looking forward to this film ever since I heard Rob Zombie was directing a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. I watched the DVD in anticipation this week, because I wanted that crazy Firefly family fresh in my head. While very little of that style of surreal craziness was present in Devil’s Rejects, another level of psycho filmmaking was reached by Rob and the Gang. If you like trash cinema, serial killers, blood, and are not easily offended, you'll like this movie.


You can’t go into The Devil’s Rejects and expect to see a horror film. That’s just not what this movie is about. This is a revenge movie, pure and simple. It’s old school style, in the tradition of Walking Tall, I Spit on Your Grave, and most other grainy exploitation films of the 70s. The Sheriff (William Forsythe) is out for revenge. While Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding are on the run tormenting and killing everyone they can, he is hunting them down in full on Dirty Harry style. There’s a lot of gun fire, a lot of blood, but amazingly enough, not nearly as much gore on screen as I expected. There was enough left off screen to make you cringe, because you know in your head what was going on.

Three problems I had with this film:

• You get the feeling that Rob Zombie wants you to care about this crazy family. You are supposed to root for them, cheer them on when the tables are turned. Problem is, it is so hard to even care what happens to these people, because they have no redeeming qualities. You just don’t give a damn. They are too crazy, too sadistic, and too extreme. Their sins rival that of Ed Gein, the Manson Family, and Jack the Ripper.


• Rob Zombie seems to be very enamored with his wife’s rear. It’s a nice one, for sure, but there were just a few too many “look at what I got” shots for me.


• I know that to save money, they filmed this somewhere other than Texas. But please, Hollywood, we don’t have a lot of mountains in Texas. We have the Guadalupes, and that’s it.

Leslie Easterbrook made a good substitute Mama Firefly. She has just the right amount of crazy, backwoods mama. (I can’t help but remember her in the Police Academy movies. What a different character here!) The scene with her and the Sheriff near the end is perfect. Bill Moseley was very sadistic as Otis Driftwood, enough so that I would rather not meet him on the street. Sheri Moon tuned down the crazy Baby laugh, so she was easier to like this time around. The scene where she explains, “it’s all a mind-f*ck” tells you so much about this movie and about the Firefly family. The classic 70’s rock is perfect for the tone of the film too.

Truth be told, there is an amazing little of redeemable, upright, moral quality in this movie. (In fact, the couple sitting behind me left within the first 15 minutes. That left me and a geek guy in the theater.) There are no good guys, unless you count the dead girls. The language is worse than a sailor’s. There’s a ton of nudity, some really skin crawling sexually molestation situations, and blood spatter to rival Dario Argento. There’s not much plot to go around, and the main characters are backwoods in the vein of the Peacock family in that X-Files episode. With so little in it to find “worthwhile,” I am not really sure why I liked it so darn much. Maybe it’s because I like those old 70s movies, with the slow motion action shots and the really bad leisure wear, or because it is so obvious that Rob Zombie is a movie freak like me (love, love, love the Star Wars conversation), or because, well, it’s hard not to like a movie that ends on a Thelma & Louise style blow-out to the tune of Freebird. Now I can’t get the darn song out of my head.