Review of The Devil's Rejects (2005) by Antony T — 28 Dec 2009

Horror movies are as rare as tarmac truffles in terms of delivering that sharp intake of 'f*** me sideways' breath. In most cases they rest on formulaic lines of tedium, sandbagging the flood of unimaginative storyline with layers of special effects that drive enthusiasm to distraction. Batons get passed on from previous genre-specific shockers to become clumsily dropped by ponytailed idiots with budgets bulking up the brain space where creativity has long left the building. Thus we get numerous staggeringly boring haunted house, summer camp and masked killer flicks, each in turn cheapening the memory of the original radical scaries that tapped into our primal neuroses. I can't recall any recent film (apart from 'The Blair Witch Project') that has created that chest-tightening sense of anxiety, or made you leave the cinema either in stunned silence or moist-pants adrenaline-shot wildness.

Rob Zombie recognised this. His work with White Zombie hinted at a world of tattooed freaks, ghouls and evil souls haunting the dark recesses of a deserted fairground. His music is littered with samples from old B-movies and newsreels of serial killers. It's clear that Zombie consumed horror and western comics with a gusto that could only come from a generation that fed off the post-war fears of nuclear oblivion, the bogeyman and UFOs. If you can recall the very first time as a child you rode on a ghost train, then Zombie will have distilled those tears.

'Devil's Rejects' is an unique horror movie. Rather than treading that familiar genre path, Zombie shoots us back to the 70s and mixes us up a collage of concepts where road trips, hillbillies, psychos, necrophiliacs, dysfunctional famillies, pimps, whores and maverick killer police collide violently in the dustbowls of California's ghostlands. The movie is littered with homages to old cop shows, westerns and monochrome comedies; splays out visions of backwater hick towns with their filthy whorehouses, shacks and rotten trailers, and challenges our allegiances to and from a violently sociopathic group of murderers. It also throws in some laughs along the way to allow us to catch our breaths from the carnage before our eyes.

The cast is inspired. Sid Haig dishes out a tower of demented wretchedness as the patriarch Captain Spaulding, a rotten-toothed cokehead giant in magicake who conforms to just about every fear we ever had about clowns; William Forsythe spews out sermons of psychotic revenge as Sheriff Wydell (including his own Travis Bickle mirror scene); Bill Moseley arguably steals the show as Otis, possibly the most accurate celluloid depiction of Charles Manson yet. His "I am the Devil..." last words to a dying Johnny Cash fan (whose head he is about to stave in) is apparently a direct quote of Chuck's and clearly the stuff of nightmares. Sheri Moon Zombie is passable, though an irritating verbal squeak can only be redeemed by a perfect derriere. The rest are pages from the worst lowlife freakshow you could ever be unlucky to stumble across: mutants, chicken fuckers, trailer trash hired killers. And Michael Berryman.

Zombie hones his craft well, combining the visuals (a sort of sepia chromatic lighting and scene slide-shifting, redolent of 70s TV movies) with an excellent and subtle rock soundtrack that embellishes the scenes rather than shoulder charges them aside (Michael Mann take note). The denouement achieves something I never thought possible: it makes us reassess our ingrained hatred for Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Freebird'. In fact the song should now only ever be associated with this movie, so well do the two mediums clutch each other in an incubus of sight & sound. Otherwise it should perish in the flames of an aircrash.

'Devil's Rejects' succeeds on many fronts. Whereas Zombie's teeth-cutting debut, the deranged 'House of 1000 Corpses' was in essence a series of ever-crazier vignettes that appeared to have little relationship to each other and left us with a blank taste of unfulfillment (a bit like a bag of Revels); 'Devil's Rejects' taps into our terrified and romantic personifications of serial killing desperadoes. It's obvious that Zombie has given us the Manson Family cult morphed into the Three Stooges. As a consequence we are appalled at the Firefly familly's wanton and somewhat comical disregard for human life, yet inwardly applaud when Otis cuts the face off an irritating city cowboy. At the end of the film we see what looks like 8mm home movies of the family, goofing about in the sun and acting just like any normal loving bunch of West coast hippy folks. This is a subtle mark of genius. Zombie is playing games with our morality, and it's difficult not to be enchanted. Tooty-f**kin'-fruity.