Dir. Rob Zombie, 2005, US, 101 mins
Cast: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, William Forsythe, Leslie Easterbrook
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lot to answer for. Seminal, era defining film that it undoubtedly is, revolutionising the way an audience encountered pure, physical violence, it unfortunately also helped spawn countless other dreary, B-movie retreads. The plot, known to us all by now, has become cliché: a group of WASP naïve teenagers, in various stages of prepubescent relationships, on a celebratory hike around the byways of the deep South, get lost/break down, to innocently wander into a creepy house/town/gas station to seek help, only to discover that the local inbred, mutant, psycho family who reside there have a penchant for killing said nubile, moronic victims, and blood, guts, jump cuts, creaking floorboards, and a jolty soundtrack ensue, each death more gruesome than the last. Ho hum! So on hearing that another such 70s Southern fried splatter film was winging its way to us I was suitably unimpressed. Modern spins ahoy the genre was tired, predictable, lazily made and quite frankly mind numbingly boring. That is until The Devil’s Rejects came along.
Written and directed by fright rocker Rob Zombie, The Devil’s Rejects is a different beast altogether. A loosely based sequel on his debut movie, 2003’s House Of 1000 Corpses, where we were introduced to the homicidal Firefly family for the first time. Serial killers and miscreants all, the film was essentially a very, very violent Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque throwback, as the prerequisite teenagers were gruesomely dispatched in all manner of blood splattering detail. But whereas House had a disjointed, superficial, and purely tongue in cheek exploitative feel, Rejects offers a hell of a lot more.
Ostensibly set where the first movie left off, Rejects begins with a Waco style raid on the necrophiliac-serial-killer Firefly Family Ranch. Chaos and carnage ensue, but that’s just the start of it. Mama Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook from the Police Academy franchise) is captured but Charles Manson look-a-like son Otis (Moseley), and beautiful, but deranged daughter Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie – the auteur’s wife) escape, to continue their killing spree throughout the backroads and cheap motels of Alabama, killing time terrorising the members of a touring country band Banjo & Sullivan, whilst waiting for their dear old Dad, the twisted, clown faced, and downright maniacal Captain Spalding (Haig) to turn up.
Hot on their tails is the overly zealous, and excessively violent, Sheriff Wydell (Forsythe) whose desire for justice and revenge (his State Trooper brother was gruesomely dispatched by Mama Firefly in House), has made him and his policing policy increasingly vigilante-like, as he becomes mentally unhinged, his actions immoral and repulsive. With bloodlust like this on both sides, you know it ain’t going to end pretty.
This movie truly is a disgusting, depraved, sick, horrific, unsettling, nauseating, vulgar, rank, and deplorable piece of filth; in other words a masterpiece of its genre! It hasn’t been since Irreversible that I have felt so pit-of-my-stomach uneasy and disturbed. Movies like this should have a visceral, raw, gut wrenching feel, should slap you round the face, grab you, shake you, violate you, ultimately leaving you alone to digest what you’ve just witnessed and judge it for yourself. The Devil’s Rejects does it in spades.
A direct homage to such American 70s slice and dice movies such as Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, and The Hills Have Eyes, Tobe Hopper’s Chainsaw Massacre, Zombie manages to distil the essence of such movies, pay homage to them, without insulting them or blatantly copying them. This movie is more raw, more guttural, more uncomfortable than any modern, MTV friendly, burger-tie-in, piece of pap.
Everything about the film works. It looks and sounds exactly like it came out of a film tin from the 1970s. The cinematography is suitably scuzzy, grainy, and gritty, with awkward handheld moves, clumsy zooms, big, dirty close ups, getting us closer to these psychos than we’d rather be. It’s shot like a Leone Western, with the excessive brutality of a Peckinpah shoot ‘em up. Coupled with this, the production design is so vivid it feels as if we’re right in the middle of the sun drenched, sticky, bloody desert, everywhere you turn you can see and smell rotten carcases.
The soundtrack too speaks volumes, all dirty backwater, sweaty, throbbing, classic country rock tracks; a soundtrack to tough, violent Southern life on the run. From the opening murderous shootout scored by Sweet Home Alabama, to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s epic ‘Free Bird’ closing the brutal, bloody proceedings, in a mish-mash of Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch, you’ll never listen to these songs in the same light again.
The acting too is mesmerising, cast from a line up of veritable C list stars, the kind that have populated such pale B-movie imitations over the years. Given such a chance to sink their teeth into such deplorable characters, they have elevated the previously clichéd and hackneyed with life, energy, humour and charm, letting rip with the deep, unsettling, psychological possibilities of it all. Special mention goes to William Forsythe’s Sheriff, whose fall into deeper and deeper psychotic rage is as compelling as it is disturbing.
The movie and its director should be applauded as neither pull their punches; they don’t shy away from the truth of excessive violence and they don’t make any moral judgements on its characters. With such a kernel of violence waiting to erupt the film gets claustrophobic, intimidating, oppressive and sickening. It’s hard to like these characters, but amazingly Zombie skilfully twists our allegiances back and forth, masterfully building tension and a twisted sort of empathy for them at the same time. In an age when happy endings are compulsory, where audiences are spared any real distress in a bid for ratings, in The Devil’s Rejects, no one is spared. There is no black and white, no right or wrong, just or unjust, only deplorable actions and their horrifying consequences.
If you are of a weak constitution stay away from this movie. However if you like your movies hard, fast, challenging and morally ambiguous, then this ones for you. The Devil’s Rejects may be a dysfunctional homicidal abnormal family, one you pray you never run into, but a family none the less.
Paul Murphy
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