Masterful Movie

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

I didn't think Devil's Rejects was particularly scary. It felt more like an action movie. Most of the violence was guns, but the story felt repetitive since it was just about the family murdering people. It didn't have a goal or anything to it except the cops tracking them down. We don't get to know the victims very well. Also, who was the burned victim that rescued them in the climax? I also couldn't tell if parts of it were funny. It seemed so redundant. I thought it was intended as a horror movie since its considered scary by many. It reminded me of Natural Born Killers. It seems less scary to tell the story from the villian's point of view since he has no real goal. He's just evil.

The devil's rejects is a super sick movie. It's about an extremely psychopathic family. The police go after them for stuff they did and they escape. The main awfulness of the movie is what Otis and Baby do to a group of people at a motel and what Otis does to two of them somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This movie is a sequel to House of 1,000 corpses. That and this were written by Rob Zombie. It seems right that movies like these would come out of the mind of a heavy metal rocker. In this, the sheriff, with help from a friend of Captain Spalding and two bounty hunters, catches them at a whore house and tortures them and tries to kill them for the horrible things they did. The movie is extremely nasty and disturbing and should only be watched by people who like and can take that kind of stuff.

Rob Zombie's grind house exploitation extravaganza The Devil's Rejects is as grungy, gruesome and nauseating as horror gets. It's also carefully, skillfully written, impressively designed and populated by characters that attract our morbid fascination despite their repulsive natures. He took his same Firefly Family from his debut feature House Of 1000 Corpses, yanked them out of their eclectic, psychedelic horror setting and tossed them into the dusty highways and hick towns of the southwest, setting them loose for a road trip odyssey of profane, ultra violent mass murder and often darkly (and I mean really darkly) funny mayhem. He also makes them a bit more human, as opposed to the cartoonish versions they were before. They bicker, interact and fight just as any regular person would, they just happen to be lunatic serial killers, and Zombie's poetic cesspool of a script reflects that brilliantly. We begin with a bang, as Sheriff John Quincy Wydell (William Forsythe) leads a raid on their backwoods murder shack, bullets flying, a frantic, frenetically awesome sequence. Only two escape; spunky, psycho Harley Quinn-esque Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie) and volatile, terrifying Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley). Mama Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook, taking over for a deceased Karen Black) is captured by Wydell. Baby and Otis set out on the run, meeting up with their father, demented clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), and trying to stay one step ahead of the law while murdering as many innocent people as they can. There's an extended sequence at a motel where the family terrorizes a family that is the closest it gets to the straight up horror of the first film, and is an agonizing, vomit inducing scene to watch. A lot of the style and set pieces are more like a western than anything else, and I admire Zombie's creativity for sort of switching up genres to see where he could go with it. It's almost as if the characters from a horror flick wandered into western-ville just toH shake things up. A testament to Zombie's skills in creating character (in his other films too which are all solid) is the fact that despite the sheer vileness and unapologetic, disgustingly psychotic nature of these characters, we still find ourselves wanting to hang out with them for the duration of the movie, laughing at their jokes, and dare I say it, relating to them in one way or another. That's writing and direction. Praise must be given to the performances as well. It's really tough to do the scenes that the actors are put through here (I know from experience) whether on the predator or prey side of the coin, and every performer here is amazing. Sheri Moon has a nasty streak that stings, a bubbly cutesy pie bundle of lunatic energy. Moseley turns Otis into a raving monster that would make Manson shake in his boots, giving his scenes a constant clammy tension and fuelling suspense with his wild, unpredictable nature. Haig is a hoot and a holler as Captain Spaulding, and you'll find yourself laughing at stuff he does that you just know you shouldn't find funny, but his pitch black perfect performance just makes it so. Forsythe is a revelation as Wydell. He's an actor whose energy and commitment have always drawn me in, and he's a force of brutal, corrupted nature as a man of the law whose lost his way and succumbed to the evil he is trying to vanquish. Such a badass. Zombie has a knack for delving into the cinematic nooks and crannys of yesteryear and pulling out all kinds of awesome actors that may not have been seen for a while, or that we haven't remembered are still around. Here there an incredible sideshow of supporting talent, including Danny Trejo, EG Daily, Geoffrey Lewis, Rosario Dawson, MC Gainey, Dallas Page, Ken Foree, Michael Berryman, Brian Posehn, Lew Temple, PJ Soles, Tom Towles, Matthew Mcgrory, Mary Woronov, Daniel Roebuck, Duane Whitaker and Steve Railsback. There's also some beautiful classic bluegrass and country tunes as well, from Allman Brother's Midnight Rider to Lynrd Skynrd's Free Bird, payed in its entirety over an epilogue that can only be described as epic. Now fair warning: this film is not for everyone. It's as down and dirty as movies get, and a good fair bit of it is in very bad taste indeed. But as anyone who's familiar with the sub genre will tell you, that's the point. Casual viewers on the other hand, might just crapped the bed and flip out at the rampant nihilism, relentless brutal violence, human cruelty and layer of filthy, profane scum that the movie lives in. For me, that's the fun of it.

I wasn't sure what I was going to get with The Devils Rejects, but surprisingly, I was pleasantly surprised. It had some quite humerus moments, knew what it was and never took itself too seriously. It also had a pleasant amount of violence without going overboard that you would expect in such a film. My only complaint would be the amount of horror clichés and clichés in general. The "good guys" of the film did everything that was so inherently wrong to do in certain situations and the "bad guys" managed to get away at every non opportune moments. Love it or not, Rob Zombie has managed to conjure up something truly remarkable with The Devils Rejects. It not the best piece of cinema out, but if you want some campy fun, then look no further than this.