The Devil's Rejects (2005)
Rob Zombie arrived at The Devil's Rejects (2005) with something to prove. His debut feature, House of 1000 Corpses (2003), had been a difficult birth: shot in 2000, shelved by Universal after concerns about its content, eventually picked up by Lionsgate and released to polarised notices. It was loud, garish, and wore its love of 1970s exploitation cinema on every blood-soaked sleeve. For the follow-up, Zombie made a deliberate turn, stripping away the funhouse excess and pushing his Firefly family out into the blinding Southern heat. The result is a road movie and fugitive thriller as much as it is a horror picture, produced through a cluster of companies including Cinerenta and Firm Films, again distributed by Lionsgate, and shot largely on location to give it the feel of something genuinely wrung out and sun-damaged. If House of 1000 Corpses was a fairground ride, The Devil's Rejects is what you find when the fairground closes and nobody cleans up.
Zombie wrote the screenplay himself, continuing his habit of complete creative ownership over his material. The film follows the surviving members of the Firefly clan as they flee a violent law enforcement siege, pursued by a sheriff (played by William Forsythe) whose methods grow steadily less distinguishable from those of the people he is hunting. It is a structure borrowed consciously from the grindhouse and rural-gothic American cinema of the early 1970s: Badlands, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the kind of regional drive-in pictures that played for a weekend and then vanished. That lineage is not accidental. Zombie has spoken at length about his affection for that era, and the film reads as something close to a love letter, period needle-drops and all. (For another film that plays self-consciously with genre history and a particular decade's aesthetic, Miami Vice (2006) makes for an interesting, if very different, companion piece.)
The cast is built largely from Zombie's own repertoire of collaborators and character actors. Sid Haig returns as the leering, face-painted Captain Spaulding, a role he had already made memorably unpleasant in the first film. Bill Moseley plays Otis with a kind of flat, sour menace, and Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife, is again at the centre of the family as Baby. William Forsythe brings genuine weight to the vengeful Sheriff Wydell, a character who could easily have been a straight-line antagonist but who Forsythe shades into something more unsettling. Ken Foree rounds out the principals. These are performers who understand exactly what kind of film they are in and commit accordingly, which gives the whole enterprise a coherent, if grimy, energy.
Cinematographer Phil Parmet shoots the film in a way that owes an obvious debt to the look of American regional cinema circa 1973 to 1978: overlit exteriors, bleached-out colour, interiors that feel genuinely cramped and airless. The texture is rough, almost tactile, the kind of photography that makes you feel the heat and the dust rather than simply observe it. Tyler Bates provides the score, weaving between original compositions and a selection of period rock tracks that Zombie uses to comment on, and occasionally punctuate, the action on screen. Glenn Garland's editing holds the film to a pace that is loose in the middle stretches and then tightens with intent in the final act, a rhythm that suits the film's fugitive logic. The craft is, taken on its own terms, considered and purposeful. Whether the content it serves merits that craft is another question entirely, and one I leave to what follows.
The Devil's Rejects is barely a horror film, whatever it says on the tin.
Rob Zombie's follow-up to House of 1000 Corpses ditches most of that film's cartoonish haunted-house shtick and turns into something grimier and nastier: a sun-baked, 1970s-styled chase movie in which his clan of murderous hillbillies go on the run from the law, far closer in spirit to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than to anything you would call a scary picture. It is less horror than sustained, grubby ordeal.
And it is a strange watch. It is hammy, deliberately so, all leering grotesques and quotable nastiness, but for all the blood and swagger there is not a great deal of point to any of it. Zombie plainly loves this world and these characters far more than I did; I spent most of it kept at arm's length, never much caring what became of anyone on screen. It is a marked departure from the first film, and whether you call that a step up or a step sideways will depend entirely on your stomach for this sort of thing.
When all is said, it is just alright. Well made in its scuzzy way, committed to its own ugliness, and clearly a cult favourite for those on its wavelength, but it did not do a great deal for me. Two and a half stars, a grim, hammy grindhouse throwback with a devoted following that I am afraid I am not part of.
The Devil's Rejects occupies an interesting, if uncomfortable, corner of mid-2000s American horror: a moment when a number of filmmakers were testing how far the genre could go in terms of duration and unpleasantness before audiences either converted or walked out. It has genuine devotees, and their affection for it is not hard to understand on its own terms. For a sense of how other films from the same period were pushing genre conventions in rather different directions, I also reviewed The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), which at least had the decency to make its audience laugh. And if you are curious how a film can be equally committed to its own strange world without the bloodshed, see also The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), which finds Takashi Miike doing something comparably wilful and considerably more joyful with genre material. The Devil's Rejects knows exactly what it is. The question it cannot quite answer is whether that is enough.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2026-09-24
Trailer
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