The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together: A Review of The Devil's Rejects
Saw The Devil's Rejects, the second film from writer-director Rob Zombie (who is probably still slightly better known as the front man for the defunct heavy metal band White Zombie -- named in honor of the classic 1932 horror movie allegory about "white slavery" starring Bela Lugosi -- and as a solo musician/singer/songwriter than he is as a screenwriter or director, but no bets as to how long that will obtain) and a sequel to his House of 1,000 Corpses, at a midnight (to be technical, a 12:15 a.m.) screening last night/this morning (Friday, 22 July/Saturday 23 July).
I'd not seen House of 1,000 Corpses, possibly because I'd seen the infamous Italian gore-fest Cannibal Holocaust at a midnight screening the year that Ho1kC was released (2003 -- I saw Cannibal Holocaust on Friday, 11 July 2003: the only reason I remember the date is because my eldest wanted me to take him to it as it was his eighteenth birthday, and he wanted to do something suitably "adult" in honor of the occasion; I begged off, telling him that I probably shouldn't see it, never mind him, and, once I told him what was in it, he reluctantly agreed): having endured one semi-competently executed example of staged nihilistic violence (and pointless killing of actual animals, including a tiny monkey), I'd no desire whatever to throw money at a modern take.
However, as I've noted elsewhere, 2005 seems to be my personal Year of the Zombie, if not of the horror genre in general; since the trailer for The Devil's Rejects caught my eye at various movies I've seen over the past six or seven weeks, and since the writer/director's stage name is "Rob Zombie," I figured I'd do well to check it out.
I'm happy to report that you won't be bewildered by The Devil's Rejects if you haven't seen House of 1,000 Corpses: The Devil's Rejects is an excellent recreation of the grindhouse movies of the 1960s and 1970s (chiefly Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but also early Wes Craven shockers such as The Last House on the Left [hey! with that title, that could almost be a political satire of the U.S. today, hein?] and The Hills Have Eyes) so lovingly catalogued and celebrated by Michael J. Weldon that manages to be less self-conscious than Jim Van Bebber's art-house-meets-grindhouse debut effort The Manson Family, despite the post-Tarantino riffs on pop culture salted throughout. It also gives mad props to various other movies and genres along the way, some of them decidedly more mainstream, including the late '60s/early '70s "countercultural" road movie (which Vincent Gallo all but decapitated with his excruciatingly boring, self-indulgent, and nigh-pointless wank-fest The Brown Bunny); some of Sam Peckinpah's more celebrated films (chiefly The Getaway, with a soupçon of The Wild Bunch); a liberal dose of "hellbilly" movie weltanschauüng from such films as 2,000 Maniacs, Deliverance, and Gator; and even -- Cahiers du Cinéma help us -- Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise.
That said, the downside of even an intermittently competent grindhouse film is that it's, well, exploitive: it revels in mindless, lovingly depicted -- and often extremely bloody -- violence and sadistic humiliation not merely for purposes of seeking revenge or survival or money or escape from the authorities, but because at least one of its characters gets a sexual thrill from violence that no amount of safe BDSM, "good, game and giving" transgressive sex or even illicit drugs can match. The violence in a grindhouse movie worthy of the name is so much more exploitive, sleazy and sordid than any mainstream movie (although Paul Verhoeven's and Brian De Palma's movies still often betray their neo-grindhouse sensibilities, and I hear that the Denzel Washington picture Man on Fire, directed by Tony Scott, comes pretty close to Grindhouseville) could ever hope -- or, frankly, want -- to be. While I rail against drippy "moral endings" slapped onto shockingly violent movies, or laying on the emotional cues with a shovel (as in the gang rape scene of Jodie Foster's character in The Accused, based on an actual incident, or in the death of Willem Dafoe's character in Platoon), every so often something comes along that is just so calculatedly skeevy that you want some homilies with your grit, if only to remind yourself that, no matter how much of a vicarious charge you might've gotten from the on-screen blood and thunder, you wouldn't actually do any of the things depicted therein.
The last movie that I saw like that was Jack Sholder and Jim Kouf's 1987 whack-'em-and-stack-'em alien infiltrator masterpiece The Hidden. While the on-screen mayhem in The Hidden was pretty much limited to showing the evil alien (which was mostly hidden -- hence the title -- inside various human hosts until the end) bumping off anyone who got in his way (but keep your ears peeled during the first ten minutes, boys n' girls...) rather than wallowing in a blood simple, kill-crazy spree like a demented haruspice, the family of The Devil's Rejects is all about the thrill-kill, with a record that puts those of the Manson "family" -- and the families of the various grindhouse shockers Rob Zombie's paying tribute to -- to shame. It might be a minor distinction, but it's still an important one: that the childish, malevolent greed of the evil alien in The Hidden is more understandable -- even, in its way, somewhat sympathetic -- than the violent sexual degeneracy of the family in The Devil's Rejects, even with their not wholly believable attachment towards each other. The "Devil's Rejects" family ("Devil's Rejects" is one of their pet names for themselves) plays less as an NC-17 take on the Addams Family than as the Simpsons infected with the "aesthetic" of the killer-couple in Natural Born Killers, with a slobby buffoon (literally, since he sometimes works as what has to be the most unconvincing clown in cinematic history; certainly Captain Spaulding has the worst dentition of any on-screen clown I've seen) of a patriarch, a rebellious bad-boy son, a shrill and annoying daddy's little girl, and a run-down matriarch whose deadliest weapon just might be sex; the disfigured mute giant Tiny (Matthew McGrory, whose fire-disfigured face here recalls Freddie Kreuger's from the Nightmare on Elm Street series) makes a good Bizarro World stand-in for pacifier-plugged Maggie.
The movie opens with a police raid on the Firefly family compound, led by a vengeful Sheriff John Quincey Wydell (William Forsythe: Once Upon a Time in America, Dick Tracy, American Me); although Captain J.T. Spaulding (Sid Haig) is nestled in a "romantic" hideaway with a plump pick-up, Tiny manages to warn Mama Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook, in many ways the most intimidating member of the clan), Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie), and Otis B. Driftwood (Bill Moseley, who played Chop-Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, is here made up as an Allman Brother from hell; when we first see him he's snuggled up to the naked corpse of one of his victims), and Tiny, Baby and Otis are able to make their escape after an eerie shoot-out in which the Fireflys (sic) are clad in homemade armor plate with face masks that look as though they could've been designed by Steve Ditko or Bob Burden, although Mama Firefly is jugged by the cops. Baby and Otis manage to steal a car from a good Samaritan over the film's opening credits (and as the Allman Brother's "Midnight Rider" plays on the soundtrack) and contact the not-so-good "captain" to arrange a rendezvous at a run-down motel called the Kahiki Palms. Baby and Otis take time out to relieve their tensions by terrorizing, torturing and murdering a down-at-the-heels country group called Banjo & Sullivan, which consists of Roy Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis: the 1973 Dillinger, 'Salem's Lot, Any Which Way You Can, Tango and Cash, The Way of the Gun), his wife Gloria Sullivan (Priscilla Barnes: Tintorera, Mallrats, The Crossing Guard, though she's probably best known for being the last blonde roommate -- the nurse Terri Alden -- on the TV sitcom Three's Company), their daughter Wendy (Kate Norby), and her husband Adam Banjo (Lew Temple: primarily a voice actor for English-dubbed anime, he also appeared in The Newton Boys and 21 Grams), as well as a single roadie, Jimmy (Brian Posehn, a.k.a. Jason Todd, who has done voice work for anime and Brother Bear). The black-gummed, bald and bewhiskered Captain Spaulding eventually shows up, and he tells his children to accompany him to a rural whorehouse run by his good friend Charlie, played by a bowler-hatted Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), whom he has prevailed upon for shelter. Sheriff Wydell, who has a personal stake in running the Fireflys to ground due to their torturing and murdering his police lieutenant brother George (Tom Towles, best known for playing the human cockroach Otis in the incredible Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but who also appeared in The Borrower, Mad Dog and Glory, The Rock, Warriors of Virtue and House of 1,000 Corpses), soon hires a pair of daunting ex-cons-cum-bounty-hunters-and-assassins who call themselves The Unholy Two, Rondo (the ubiquitous ex-con-turned-actor Danny Trejo: The Hidden, Maniac Cop 2, Whore, Desperado, Heat, From Dusk Till Dawn, Con Air, the Spy Kids movies, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, xXx) and Billy Ray Snapper (pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page), to deliver the errant Fireflys to him; as he tells them, "I don't care what shape they're in, so long's I can piss in their faces before they die."
Rob Zombie has a real knack for this sort of thing: the movie looks and sounds terrific; the various killers look seedy and mean as hell, and Sheri Moon Zombie has some of Sally Struthers's early wild-eyed, brittle shriekiness that is Mother Nature's way of warning you to "Stay away" -- kind of like a coral snake's colorful bands -- no matter how enticing you may otherwise find her; none of the cars look to be more recent than 1980 (but while the movie appears to take place in the late '70s/early '80s, the section of the official web site for The Devil's Rejects devoted to Sheriff Wydell suggests that it in fact takes place in the here and now: check out that timeline); he manages to vary the tone enough so that the person apt to seek this movie out isn't likely to get a surfeit of either gore and grue or macabre and filthy humor; and the soundtrack, liberally seasoned with various Southern and California rock classics from the 1970s, is apt to provide a funny-strange frisson to anybody who grew up listening to them. (In particular, I may never be able to listen to the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider," Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" [I ask you, was there ever a song that cried out more to be covered by k.d. lang??] or, yes, Lynyrd Skynrd's played-to-death "Free Bird," the same way again.)
That said, this talent is a niche market thing, though I suspect not nearly as much of a one as a local movie critic would like to think: the audience that I saw The Devil's Rejects with was good sized, well-behaved for grindcore fans (much better behaved than the audience at the local midnight premiere of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer lo, these seventeen-odd years ago), although still vocally enthusiastic and greatly amused by the proceedings. I was somewhat taken aback by that: if I had to guess, I would've thought that there would've been some chuckleheads who lustily cheered whenever the Spaulding-Firefly-Driftwood clan scored a triumph and hissed and catcalled when Sheriff Wydell and the Unholy Two got one over on "The Devil's Rejects," but this audience didn't seem to give a good goddamn who got snuffed, maimed or humiliated, so long as someone did. I suspect that even Rob Zombie might be taken aback by this response, and the lack of appreciation for his slobbo transfiguration of an ending, rather the way John Waters was to be appalled and offended over the years by various lowlifes telling him how much they loved Pink Flamingos because they eat their lovers' shit all the time. It has been a long and winding, post-modern road from Brian De Palma's Scarface to now, and if the simplistically moralizing scenes and titles intercut into Howard Hawks's original 1932 Scarface are risible, I can't claim to be pleased at the fact that the very basest of desires are so much more readily indulged today by jaded neo-atavisms who want to "fuck some shit up" just for the sake of doing it. I was one of the few in the audience who didn't chortle appreciatively at the mayhem, even at the horrible (and horribly mordant) fate of Wendy, which one-ups the exit of Carrie Snodgress's character in De Palma's The Fury; on the other hand, I was the only one in the audience who chuckled when Officer Roy Dobson (Dave Sheridan: Scary Movie, Ghost World, Corky Romano) -- who was the one to twig to the fact that the aliases used by the killers were all taken from the names of characters that Groucho Marx played -- suggested that they "find this Groucho Marx guy" and bring him in for questioning. I suspect that whatever minimal intellectual requirements today's "hipsters" have are even less than they were when I actually cared about qualifying for membership several years ago; I question too whether there were six people in the theatre besides myself who caught the references to Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh and The Unholy Three, the latter of which was used for the moniker of a bush-league team of Marvel Comics supervillains also known as the Ani-Men). Certainly the Gene Shalitesque movie critic whom the cops drag in for consultation, Morris Green (Daniel Roebuck: The River's Edge, The Fugitive, U.S. Marshals, Final Destination, and several episodes of the TV series Matlock), was heartily shouted at by the audience and told, in essence, to keep his peace. I try not to think about anybody coming out of The Devil's Rejects, tracking down a Marx Brothers movie or two, and then angrily upbraiding Rob Zombie for name-checking them because "no one gets fuckin' skragged, man," and I can only hope and trust that my fellow audience members are more like Lisa from Peter Bagge's comic book Hate in the full-page poster he drew with her shrieking "I WANT TO BE BAD!!!" in her bedroom jammed with various books, movies, posters and catalogs of the would-be "edgy hipster" -- some of which are to be found in my domicile, I must confess (i.e., the works of William S. Burroughs, various Loompanics Books catalogs, etc.) -- than once and future serial killers.
In short, I can only echo the judgment of the New York Times's Dana Stevens, who noted in yesterday's edition (Friday, 22 July) that, while The Devil's Rejects "looks sensational, [...] there is a curious emptiness at its core....Because the film's mood shifts so quickly from playful perversity to primal dread, and because the Firefly family's wickedness seems unmotivated by anything but pure caprice, The Devil's Rejects soon devolves into a tedious moral muddle: Who's good? Who's evil? Who cares? " People who are bothered by this sort of thing -- or, more precisely, people who are bothered by other people who demonstrably aren't troubled by the loving, nonjudgmental depiction of a morally blank world -- will perforce have an ambivalent reaction to The Devil's Rejects, no matter how thrilled they are to see the strapping Ken Foree again (even if only as a pimp), or cameos by such cult film celebrities as Michael Berryman, P.J. Soles, Deborah Van Valkenburg, Mary Woronov and Steve Railsback, or to finally lay eyes on the voice of Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls, Elizabeth (E.G.) Daily, playing one of the whores at Charlie's bordello. You may well want to eschew some of the dubious thrills of the suburban grindhouse and wait to see The Devil's Rejects on DVD; as the Detroit Free Press's main movie critic, Terry Lawson, observes, "To see the movie, you have to be in proximity to other human beings, which will only make you feel dirtier." One might well argue that it is this that is the real take-away of The Devil's Rejects.
I'd not seen House of 1,000 Corpses, possibly because I'd seen the infamous Italian gore-fest Cannibal Holocaust at a midnight screening the year that Ho1kC was released (2003 -- I saw Cannibal Holocaust on Friday, 11 July 2003: the only reason I remember the date is because my eldest wanted me to take him to it as it was his eighteenth birthday, and he wanted to do something suitably "adult" in honor of the occasion; I begged off, telling him that I probably shouldn't see it, never mind him, and, once I told him what was in it, he reluctantly agreed): having endured one semi-competently executed example of staged nihilistic violence (and pointless killing of actual animals, including a tiny monkey), I'd no desire whatever to throw money at a modern take.
However, as I've noted elsewhere, 2005 seems to be my personal Year of the Zombie, if not of the horror genre in general; since the trailer for The Devil's Rejects caught my eye at various movies I've seen over the past six or seven weeks, and since the writer/director's stage name is "Rob Zombie," I figured I'd do well to check it out.
I'm happy to report that you won't be bewildered by The Devil's Rejects if you haven't seen House of 1,000 Corpses: The Devil's Rejects is an excellent recreation of the grindhouse movies of the 1960s and 1970s (chiefly Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but also early Wes Craven shockers such as The Last House on the Left [hey! with that title, that could almost be a political satire of the U.S. today, hein?] and The Hills Have Eyes) so lovingly catalogued and celebrated by Michael J. Weldon that manages to be less self-conscious than Jim Van Bebber's art-house-meets-grindhouse debut effort The Manson Family, despite the post-Tarantino riffs on pop culture salted throughout. It also gives mad props to various other movies and genres along the way, some of them decidedly more mainstream, including the late '60s/early '70s "countercultural" road movie (which Vincent Gallo all but decapitated with his excruciatingly boring, self-indulgent, and nigh-pointless wank-fest The Brown Bunny); some of Sam Peckinpah's more celebrated films (chiefly The Getaway, with a soupçon of The Wild Bunch); a liberal dose of "hellbilly" movie weltanschauüng from such films as 2,000 Maniacs, Deliverance, and Gator; and even -- Cahiers du Cinéma help us -- Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise.
That said, the downside of even an intermittently competent grindhouse film is that it's, well, exploitive: it revels in mindless, lovingly depicted -- and often extremely bloody -- violence and sadistic humiliation not merely for purposes of seeking revenge or survival or money or escape from the authorities, but because at least one of its characters gets a sexual thrill from violence that no amount of safe BDSM, "good, game and giving" transgressive sex or even illicit drugs can match. The violence in a grindhouse movie worthy of the name is so much more exploitive, sleazy and sordid than any mainstream movie (although Paul Verhoeven's and Brian De Palma's movies still often betray their neo-grindhouse sensibilities, and I hear that the Denzel Washington picture Man on Fire, directed by Tony Scott, comes pretty close to Grindhouseville) could ever hope -- or, frankly, want -- to be. While I rail against drippy "moral endings" slapped onto shockingly violent movies, or laying on the emotional cues with a shovel (as in the gang rape scene of Jodie Foster's character in The Accused, based on an actual incident, or in the death of Willem Dafoe's character in Platoon), every so often something comes along that is just so calculatedly skeevy that you want some homilies with your grit, if only to remind yourself that, no matter how much of a vicarious charge you might've gotten from the on-screen blood and thunder, you wouldn't actually do any of the things depicted therein.
The last movie that I saw like that was Jack Sholder and Jim Kouf's 1987 whack-'em-and-stack-'em alien infiltrator masterpiece The Hidden. While the on-screen mayhem in The Hidden was pretty much limited to showing the evil alien (which was mostly hidden -- hence the title -- inside various human hosts until the end) bumping off anyone who got in his way (but keep your ears peeled during the first ten minutes, boys n' girls...) rather than wallowing in a blood simple, kill-crazy spree like a demented haruspice, the family of The Devil's Rejects is all about the thrill-kill, with a record that puts those of the Manson "family" -- and the families of the various grindhouse shockers Rob Zombie's paying tribute to -- to shame. It might be a minor distinction, but it's still an important one: that the childish, malevolent greed of the evil alien in The Hidden is more understandable -- even, in its way, somewhat sympathetic -- than the violent sexual degeneracy of the family in The Devil's Rejects, even with their not wholly believable attachment towards each other. The "Devil's Rejects" family ("Devil's Rejects" is one of their pet names for themselves) plays less as an NC-17 take on the Addams Family than as the Simpsons infected with the "aesthetic" of the killer-couple in Natural Born Killers, with a slobby buffoon (literally, since he sometimes works as what has to be the most unconvincing clown in cinematic history; certainly Captain Spaulding has the worst dentition of any on-screen clown I've seen) of a patriarch, a rebellious bad-boy son, a shrill and annoying daddy's little girl, and a run-down matriarch whose deadliest weapon just might be sex; the disfigured mute giant Tiny (Matthew McGrory, whose fire-disfigured face here recalls Freddie Kreuger's from the Nightmare on Elm Street series) makes a good Bizarro World stand-in for pacifier-plugged Maggie.
The movie opens with a police raid on the Firefly family compound, led by a vengeful Sheriff John Quincey Wydell (William Forsythe: Once Upon a Time in America, Dick Tracy, American Me); although Captain J.T. Spaulding (Sid Haig) is nestled in a "romantic" hideaway with a plump pick-up, Tiny manages to warn Mama Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook, in many ways the most intimidating member of the clan), Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie), and Otis B. Driftwood (Bill Moseley, who played Chop-Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, is here made up as an Allman Brother from hell; when we first see him he's snuggled up to the naked corpse of one of his victims), and Tiny, Baby and Otis are able to make their escape after an eerie shoot-out in which the Fireflys (sic) are clad in homemade armor plate with face masks that look as though they could've been designed by Steve Ditko or Bob Burden, although Mama Firefly is jugged by the cops. Baby and Otis manage to steal a car from a good Samaritan over the film's opening credits (and as the Allman Brother's "Midnight Rider" plays on the soundtrack) and contact the not-so-good "captain" to arrange a rendezvous at a run-down motel called the Kahiki Palms. Baby and Otis take time out to relieve their tensions by terrorizing, torturing and murdering a down-at-the-heels country group called Banjo & Sullivan, which consists of Roy Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis: the 1973 Dillinger, 'Salem's Lot, Any Which Way You Can, Tango and Cash, The Way of the Gun), his wife Gloria Sullivan (Priscilla Barnes: Tintorera, Mallrats, The Crossing Guard, though she's probably best known for being the last blonde roommate -- the nurse Terri Alden -- on the TV sitcom Three's Company), their daughter Wendy (Kate Norby), and her husband Adam Banjo (Lew Temple: primarily a voice actor for English-dubbed anime, he also appeared in The Newton Boys and 21 Grams), as well as a single roadie, Jimmy (Brian Posehn, a.k.a. Jason Todd, who has done voice work for anime and Brother Bear). The black-gummed, bald and bewhiskered Captain Spaulding eventually shows up, and he tells his children to accompany him to a rural whorehouse run by his good friend Charlie, played by a bowler-hatted Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), whom he has prevailed upon for shelter. Sheriff Wydell, who has a personal stake in running the Fireflys to ground due to their torturing and murdering his police lieutenant brother George (Tom Towles, best known for playing the human cockroach Otis in the incredible Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but who also appeared in The Borrower, Mad Dog and Glory, The Rock, Warriors of Virtue and House of 1,000 Corpses), soon hires a pair of daunting ex-cons-cum-bounty-hunters-and-assassins who call themselves The Unholy Two, Rondo (the ubiquitous ex-con-turned-actor Danny Trejo: The Hidden, Maniac Cop 2, Whore, Desperado, Heat, From Dusk Till Dawn, Con Air, the Spy Kids movies, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, xXx) and Billy Ray Snapper (pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page), to deliver the errant Fireflys to him; as he tells them, "I don't care what shape they're in, so long's I can piss in their faces before they die."
Rob Zombie has a real knack for this sort of thing: the movie looks and sounds terrific; the various killers look seedy and mean as hell, and Sheri Moon Zombie has some of Sally Struthers's early wild-eyed, brittle shriekiness that is Mother Nature's way of warning you to "Stay away" -- kind of like a coral snake's colorful bands -- no matter how enticing you may otherwise find her; none of the cars look to be more recent than 1980 (but while the movie appears to take place in the late '70s/early '80s, the section of the official web site for The Devil's Rejects devoted to Sheriff Wydell suggests that it in fact takes place in the here and now: check out that timeline); he manages to vary the tone enough so that the person apt to seek this movie out isn't likely to get a surfeit of either gore and grue or macabre and filthy humor; and the soundtrack, liberally seasoned with various Southern and California rock classics from the 1970s, is apt to provide a funny-strange frisson to anybody who grew up listening to them. (In particular, I may never be able to listen to the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider," Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" [I ask you, was there ever a song that cried out more to be covered by k.d. lang??] or, yes, Lynyrd Skynrd's played-to-death "Free Bird," the same way again.)
That said, this talent is a niche market thing, though I suspect not nearly as much of a one as a local movie critic would like to think: the audience that I saw The Devil's Rejects with was good sized, well-behaved for grindcore fans (much better behaved than the audience at the local midnight premiere of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer lo, these seventeen-odd years ago), although still vocally enthusiastic and greatly amused by the proceedings. I was somewhat taken aback by that: if I had to guess, I would've thought that there would've been some chuckleheads who lustily cheered whenever the Spaulding-Firefly-Driftwood clan scored a triumph and hissed and catcalled when Sheriff Wydell and the Unholy Two got one over on "The Devil's Rejects," but this audience didn't seem to give a good goddamn who got snuffed, maimed or humiliated, so long as someone did. I suspect that even Rob Zombie might be taken aback by this response, and the lack of appreciation for his slobbo transfiguration of an ending, rather the way John Waters was to be appalled and offended over the years by various lowlifes telling him how much they loved Pink Flamingos because they eat their lovers' shit all the time. It has been a long and winding, post-modern road from Brian De Palma's Scarface to now, and if the simplistically moralizing scenes and titles intercut into Howard Hawks's original 1932 Scarface are risible, I can't claim to be pleased at the fact that the very basest of desires are so much more readily indulged today by jaded neo-atavisms who want to "fuck some shit up" just for the sake of doing it. I was one of the few in the audience who didn't chortle appreciatively at the mayhem, even at the horrible (and horribly mordant) fate of Wendy, which one-ups the exit of Carrie Snodgress's character in De Palma's The Fury; on the other hand, I was the only one in the audience who chuckled when Officer Roy Dobson (Dave Sheridan: Scary Movie, Ghost World, Corky Romano) -- who was the one to twig to the fact that the aliases used by the killers were all taken from the names of characters that Groucho Marx played -- suggested that they "find this Groucho Marx guy" and bring him in for questioning. I suspect that whatever minimal intellectual requirements today's "hipsters" have are even less than they were when I actually cared about qualifying for membership several years ago; I question too whether there were six people in the theatre besides myself who caught the references to Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh and The Unholy Three, the latter of which was used for the moniker of a bush-league team of Marvel Comics supervillains also known as the Ani-Men). Certainly the Gene Shalitesque movie critic whom the cops drag in for consultation, Morris Green (Daniel Roebuck: The River's Edge, The Fugitive, U.S. Marshals, Final Destination, and several episodes of the TV series Matlock), was heartily shouted at by the audience and told, in essence, to keep his peace. I try not to think about anybody coming out of The Devil's Rejects, tracking down a Marx Brothers movie or two, and then angrily upbraiding Rob Zombie for name-checking them because "no one gets fuckin' skragged, man," and I can only hope and trust that my fellow audience members are more like Lisa from Peter Bagge's comic book Hate in the full-page poster he drew with her shrieking "I WANT TO BE BAD!!!" in her bedroom jammed with various books, movies, posters and catalogs of the would-be "edgy hipster" -- some of which are to be found in my domicile, I must confess (i.e., the works of William S. Burroughs, various Loompanics Books catalogs, etc.) -- than once and future serial killers.
In short, I can only echo the judgment of the New York Times's Dana Stevens, who noted in yesterday's edition (Friday, 22 July) that, while The Devil's Rejects "looks sensational, [...] there is a curious emptiness at its core....Because the film's mood shifts so quickly from playful perversity to primal dread, and because the Firefly family's wickedness seems unmotivated by anything but pure caprice, The Devil's Rejects soon devolves into a tedious moral muddle: Who's good? Who's evil? Who cares? " People who are bothered by this sort of thing -- or, more precisely, people who are bothered by other people who demonstrably aren't troubled by the loving, nonjudgmental depiction of a morally blank world -- will perforce have an ambivalent reaction to The Devil's Rejects, no matter how thrilled they are to see the strapping Ken Foree again (even if only as a pimp), or cameos by such cult film celebrities as Michael Berryman, P.J. Soles, Deborah Van Valkenburg, Mary Woronov and Steve Railsback, or to finally lay eyes on the voice of Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls, Elizabeth (E.G.) Daily, playing one of the whores at Charlie's bordello. You may well want to eschew some of the dubious thrills of the suburban grindhouse and wait to see The Devil's Rejects on DVD; as the Detroit Free Press's main movie critic, Terry Lawson, observes, "To see the movie, you have to be in proximity to other human beings, which will only make you feel dirtier." One might well argue that it is this that is the real take-away of The Devil's Rejects.