The Devil’s Rejects
August 17th, 2005
I’ve been a big fan of Rob Zombie ever since I first heard White Zombie (via a KMFDM remix of “Thunder Kiss ‘65″) waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1995. His music and public persona were both high-camp psychobilly metal, so obviously influenced by ’60s and ’70s horror/sci-fi/exploitation kitsch that I couldn’t help but love the dude - especially his artwork, which was so clearly derived from the artistic stylings of Vault of Horror and all those dear old comic shlock masterpieces, and his film-sampling mentality. You see, Herr Zombie is a fanboy: a bigger-than-life grungy nerd with an obsessive love of Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, Jess Franco, late-nite horrorfest hosts, giant killer robots, lesbian vampires, and all the blood-drenched schlock that made drive-in slasher flicks such a fun time in the 1970s. And when I heard he had a film coming out, rumored to be so gory and despicable that no major movie company wanted to touch it, well…I just had to see what might be this decade’s Cannibal Holocaust!
Too bad House of 1000 Corpses turned out to be more like this decade’s The Hills Have Eyes infernally crossbred with Orgy of the Dead: a very fun, sometimes creepy, but ultimately piecemeal pastiche of psychotronic kitsch that was more like a filmic Frankenstein’s monster built from pieces and images harvested from all those schlocky ol’ gorefests and creeper movies Zombie loved when he was growing up. Mind you, I still loved the movie…but, then again, I never believed any of the hype that Fangoria and other horror mouthpieces were slathering over the film (you know, “Zombie’s unique vision is going to revolutionize horror” and “Zombie singlehandedly reanimates the ’70s horror film” and blah blah blah) because I knew none of it could be true. C’mon, people: Rob Zombie is a very creative guy, but his creativity is much in the same vein as the creativity of some of the world’s finest mash-up artists - he takes bits and pieces of his influences and remixes them into new, but of course strangely familiar, creations. He’s not a pioneer breaking new ground in music and/or film, and I don’t think he ever meant to be. He just wants to make music and films based on his favorite influences. Nothing at all wrong with that, mind you, and I watched House of 1000 Corpses for the first time expecting it to be what it more or less was: a horror fanboy’s tribute to the lurid, bloodsoaked craziness of ’70s horror American and Italian horror cinema.
As such it was very amusing, and full of great performances - particularly veteran character actors Sid Haig as the hilariously psychotic Captain Spaulding and Karen Black as Mother Firefly, though Zombie’s own wife Sherri Moon does a great job as giddy sexpot Baby and Bill Mosely literally sweats criminal insanity as Otis - but it was ultimately just a glitzy, gory, 90-minute snuff film in which your standard bunch of lost young people get offed one after the other but a collection of backwoods crazies and comicbook monsters. Hell, I watch the film now as more or a very, very, very dark comedy with a uniquely sick sense of humor rather than as a horror film.
When I heard Zombie was working on another film, tentatively titled The Devil’s Rejects, I didn’t expect it to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses: it sounded like a whole new idea. Then I discovered it was going to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, and I got the usual sinking feeling in my gut: the first was fun, but do we really need a follow-up film that would probably just try to repeat all the tricks and concepts from the original and thereby run them into the ground? What more could you do with the Firefly family, Dr. Satan, Captain Spaulding, and the rest? Just feed them some more college kids to grind up? Well…as more and more detail came out about The Devil’s Rejects, I started to feel a lot more hopeful. Yes, it was still more or less a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, but Zombie was doing something totally different with this film. He had an actual story to tell with this one, and I wondered with a little trepidation just how he was going to handle taking a different tack–the film could make up for all of House of 1000 Corpses‘ weakness, or it could just magnify them….
The Devil’s Rejects is not so much a sequel to the first film as it is a complete re-imagining of it, a reworking of its characters into truly terrifying madmen, and a much better film that tells a harrowing and EXTREMELY intense tale of sunbaked, bloodcaked “Murder, Mayhem, and Revenge”…and does so with style, humor, and a vision 1000 times more cohesive and developed than House of 1000 Corpses. It’s still a fanboy film, but this time it shows just how good a film directed by a man who truly loves his subject can be.
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