Movie Review: The Devil's Rejects

It’s like when they pulled up the coelacanth out of the ocean in 1938 and everybody lost their shit. It’s just like that.

I went and saw “The Devil’s Rejects” last Saturday with two other people who are fans of horror movies without being fanatic about it: Alex, familiar to you all as the webmaster of this site, and my wife Elisabeth. Alex almost didn’t go. He expected it to be pointlessly brutal.

It’s not surprising somebody would think that. The reviewers all make it sound like Rob Zombie invented cinematic violence. That somebody is getting killed in every frame of the movie. Clearly these same reviewers failed to view “Sin City” or “Kill Bill” or “War of the fucking Worlds”, because all of those movies have about ten times as much violence. And all of them are more gratuitous about it.

Elisabeth just loves Rob Zombie, or she wouldn’t have gone to see it. She was worried she would have to walk out if it was too scary. Blood doesn’t bother her—she knows it’s fake. What bothers her is when a director sets you up with so much tension, so much moody music and long dark corridors and endless shots of people yelling “Hello?” into rooms full of nasty lurking things that you never get to see… Well, she likes being scared in moderation. A little goes a long way, and too much quickly turns into torture.

You can understand why she would be afraid of “The Devil’s Rejects”. All of the promotion and advertising and interviews and pre-release press has made it sound like the biggest horror movie of the decade. It’s not. It’s big, sure. It just isn’t a horror movie.

Nobody got the fucking point, except for Rob Zombie, who just graduated from “clever hipster” to “brilliant filmmaker”. What he has made is an entertaining movie. That’s all.

But what a surprise it was. When they pulled up the coelacanth and everybody was like, “Jesus, that’s one ugly-ass fish”, it took a while for people to realize that what they had was a creature that was supposed to be extinct for millions of years but had somehow survived through every possible calamity. It’s going to take a while for the critics and the studios and even the fans to realize that what Rob Zombie has made here is simply what movies used to be, and what they no longer are, which is fun.

As late as the sixties when they made a movie they didn’t think about what “niche market” or “key demographic” they were selling it to. They didn’t expect it to be an “event” and they didn’t worry about how much it would gross on its one good weekend. For our part we didn’t try to define our personalities by the kind of movies we liked and we didn’t go to films demanding they be faithful to the book or have some kind of philosophical depth (which killed the “Matrix”). Then Spielberg made “Jaws” and suddenly the movies became the dominant American art form and all those French intellectuals got reinterpreted so that Jerry Lewis had to mean something and suddenly the spectacle surrounding the film, the story of the story, became more important than the story itself… before all that people were expected to go to the movie theater and enjoy themselves.

Rob Zombie has made an exceptionally enjoyable film. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s depth here. There’s real auteurship. Zombie plays with the conventions—and our expectations—without ever getting experimental. He turns things around in his third act and makes us look at ourselves, sure. But he also wants us to like his film.

And I, for one, did. There is nothing wrong with this film except its title (which is cool but pointless and makes no sense even when he tries to explain it in a throwaway voiceover). It is shot beautifully and it is directed tightly and it is written in such a way that you don’t feel guilty when you laugh and you don’t feel abused when you cringe. The actors never give in to the urge to go campy or ridiculous and they manage to breathe real life into some truly bizarre characters. There is a scene with “Mama Firefly” that literally left the audience applauding in the middle of the movie because it is acted and written so well. At no time does Zombie insult his audience. At no point does he assume we’re so stupid or morally listless we need our hands held or our consciences rebooted. He never apologizes for his characters, who are truly villainous, and yet he never lets our sympathies waver, either. You know who you’re rooting for and you know you don’t want to examine what that says about you and in the end, in the truly sublime ending of this film, it’s all made okay, you are forgiven for having had a good time and you get to go home.

I liked “House of a Thousand Corpses” despite itself. The cheese and the pretention and the camp made it a commentary on all those great movies we saw as kids. This film, which is widely trumpeted as being even more pointed in its homage, is in fact not a commentary on anything. It’s a primary source, an original thing on this earth. It even pulls off that most magical of film-making tricks: it is the sequel that makes its antecedent better. “House” is a more interesting film because now we know how it really ends.

Good God I had a blast watching this movie. If you’re sitting on the fence, if you haven’t decided if you can handle it or not, just go already. “Devil’s Rejects” won’t win any Oscars but I can say without irony that it’s the best movie made this year.