Have you ever read a fanfic where author clearly 1) likes the characters and 2) hates literally everything else about the world and setting and tone? Star Trek, but it’s a dystopia and everyone’s angsty and gay? Harry Potter, but there’s no magic and everyone has up-to-date political views?*
The Devil’s Rejects was and is Rob Zombie doing revisionist fanfic of his own work. It preserves the characters of 2003’s House of 1,000 Corpses but otherwise reinvents their entire world, tabula rasa. The first movie was trippy and phantasmagoric, more inspired by Rocky Horror Picture Show than, say, Tobe Hooper (also “influenced” by the budget running out by the end, as Rob admits). This one’s a different beast: as visceral and ugly as pyloric stenosis surgery performed on a taxidermized fetus stuffed with wriggling hairless baby mice. It’s a raw, bracing film, and you want to take a hot shower after it’s done. You feel its foulness baked into your skin.
I watched it 18 years ago through a cloud of resentment: Rob Zombie was my favorite musician at the time, and his filmmaking gig took him away from that. When he returned to music, I no longer liked him as much. You have to move on. Unconditional love does not exist. However, he still is family.
The Devil’s Rejects‘s small, bloody plot begins on a small bloody plot: the local sheriff raids a farmstead where 75 homicides and disappearances have taken place. After a rousing shootout, the surviving members of the (Manson-inspired) Firefly family go on the run, while the sheriff chases them, becoming increasingly unhinged in his own methods.
If you want gore, this has it. It also has a fun, lively script, peppered with one-liners. “Boy, the next word that comes out of your mouth better be some brilliant fuckin’ Mark Twain shit, ’cause it’s definitely gettin’ chiseled on your tombstone.”
Rob’s a “Quentin Tarantino” filmmaker. He doesn’t make movies about reality. He makes movies about movies. In this case, it’s Sam Peckinpah, blaxploitation, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and sundry other things, filmed through the distorted Monstervision lens of Rob’s imagination. Everything has a bleary carnival vibe where it’s trying to conjure or evoke or remind you of something you saw before, but in a cracked, broken-down form. This movie recognizes that carnivals are never more compelling than when they’re old, rusty, and breaking down. When the paint chips, and the muzak distorts, and the rides might suddenly kill you. There’s a real dry, arid air of death and dying about this film. You’re seeing American culture being tanned out to leather under the blazing sun.
But it’s incredibly referential. I often wonder if there’s much to the movie, once you wash away the dried blood of its influences. The “Freebird” shot at the end is all about redeeming the idea that “Freebird” can be a serious song, which, of course, relies on the audience knowing that it’s a stand up comedy punchline.
Then comes a scene mid-movie a woman (Kate Norby, I believe) runs out onto a highway wearing her husband’s face as a mask (long story). She seemingly cannot hear approaching cars and trucks until they literally are in frame. I believe that this is a reference to Sergio Leone’s patented “things outside the frame don’t ontologically exist” approach…fuck it, here’s Ebert.
A vast empty Western landscape. The camera pans across it. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us. In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.
Review of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
…but if you don’t know about that fourth-wall-bending technique, the character’s behavior just seems bizarre. Like she’s spontaneously become deaf. It’d be fun to try this movie out on a person who’s never seen a movie before. An Andaman Islander or something.
Sid Haig is despicably great. Rob Zombie’s wife punches the clock and does her usual job. Bill Moseley is suitably depraved and desperate. And speaking of dearly departed Rog, there’s a film critic character who seems like a merger of Ebert and Siskel—the movie gets a few mean laughs at his expense, then throws him out on his ass. Rob doesn’t like critics much.
As with House of 1,000 Corpses and his later films, it’s weird and confusing around the edges. One of those jigsaw puzzles where the sides aren’t straight lines, but fit still more puzzle pieces. Some of the actors don’t quite seem to get what movie they’re in. And there’s a lot of faffing around in the middle involving bounty hunters and carnie owners that feels like “unnecessary complications”. The film seems to have barely any story—it’s driven by vicious, limbic-system horror gore and comedic gags that sometimes work and other times don’t. (The scene involving the chicken-fucking appears to be an attempt at a “do you think I’m funny?” classic-movie scene, but it falters because there’s little at stake and the characters don’t matter.) Genuinely clever writing exists alongside the kind of dumb shit you normally get from Eli Roth. So there’s a lot of texture and unevenness to the film.
But there’s one unreservedly great scene. “Tutti fucking fruity”.
It’s a canonical example of how a scene can add literally nothing to the plot, yet carry the movie’s soul on its shoulders. The Fireflys stop to get ice cream. That’s the scene. They don’t murder the ice cream vendor, or do anything weird. They just get ice cream. This scene makes me extremely uncomfortable: why do these depraved serial killers suddenly seem sympathetic, relatable, and human, just because they stopped for ice cream?
Well, that’s the movie. These people aren’t space aliens or monsters: they’re people. A family. A neuroscientist would compare my brain with Otis B Driftwood’s and find them basically identical. The best of men and the worst of men are about 1% apart.
(*I don’t say that as criticism of fanfiction. As Lev Grossman said: “I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, but manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”)
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