Within the horror genre, there’s a subset of great films that specialize
in real horror, not so much as entertainment but as a visceral experience. They offer the
chill of being trapped in someone’s skin as they’re being terrorized,
but without the assurance that everything is going to turn out all right. Movies like The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House On The Left are classic examples,
and though they don’t qualify as horror films per se, contemporary films
like Funny Games, Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, Man
Bites Dog, and Audition all evoke the same feelings of deep dread.
The life of these films inevitably follow more or less the same pattern: They’re
reviled in some if not most critical circles and they make little to no impact
at the box office, only to be embraced by a fervent cult following and hailed
as a classic 20 years later.
With Rob Zombie’s inspired new grindhouse homage
The
Devil’s Rejects, I want in on the ground floor. To get the standard
caveats out of the way: This is not a movie for everyone. Even those who can stomach
the most grisly and shocking material imaginable—and those who can’t,
don’t say you weren’t warned—are not necessarily going to find
the film’s unrelenting nastiness redeemable in any way. Our own Keith Phipps,
who recognizes Zombie’s talent and admires the film’s technical brio,
admits to being wrung out by the experience. (His review can be found here.)
But for the right audience—sickos like me, I guess—this year has yet
to produce a more exciting piece of American filmmaking.
The Devil’s Rejects is a continuation of Zombie’s first feature House Of 1,000 Corpses, a misbegotten studio project that nonetheless
shows flashes of ability at times, notably Captain Spaulding’s “murder
ride” (a homespun backwoods tribute to serial killer lore) and a haunting
sequence set to Slim Whitman’s version of “I Remember You.”
A messy conflation of ‘70s drive-in fare, Universal horror references, and
music-video shock effects, Corpses has ambition, but it also bears the
mark of inexperience, and the third act just wallows in bloody mayhem. Corpses
was confined mainly to the home of the sadistic Firefly family of serial killers,
but The Devil’s Rejects hits the open road after two members (Bill
Moseley’s Otis and Sheri Moon Zombie’s Baby) of the clan escape from
the Straw Dogs-like siege that opens the film. Zombie still maximizes
the intensity of small spaces, especially in a terrifying stretch where Otis and
Baby hole up in a motel room with a country act called Banjo & Sullivan, but
he also appreciates great expanses of land, which he shoots like a Peckinpah western.
The Devil’s Rejects is as much a movie-movie as Quentin Tarantino’s
grindhouse opus Kill Bill, but watching it makes you realize how thick
the quotation marks are when Tarantino references the down-and-dirty genre films
he loves. To some degree, it’s this safe distance that allows Tarantino
movies to be approached as art and Zombie’s movie to be dismissed as trash.
Zombie is every bit the cinema junkie—witness the hilarious scene in which
the local movie critic is called on to identify Groucho Marx’s aliases,
and then launches into an impromptu deconstruction of Otto Preminger’s career—but The Devil’s Rejects feels utterly authentic, like being transported
via time machine to the 1970s, when horror movies meant business.
Also: The best use of "Freebird" since your high-school graduation.