Overall Rating
  Awesome: 22.92%
Worth A Look: 12.62%
Average: 1.99%
Pretty Bad: 8.64%
Total Crap: 53.82%
9 reviews, 247 user ratings
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| Devil's Rejects, The |
by Scott Weinberg
"You've GOT to be kidding me."
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Here's how to turn a somewhat talented gimmick-rock act into a desperately untalented and shamelessly pandering gimmick-moviemaker. Robert Cummings (OK, trick or treaters, sorry; it's ROB ZOMBIE) has officially become the Jerry Springer of the horror movie set, entirely willing to dish out the ugliest, loudest, stupidest, and most inept sort of garbage imaginable -- and somehow the horror freaks give the guy a free pass, just because he's not making PG-13 kiddie horror.Astute movie geeks will be able to spot Mr. Cummings' influences and inspirations with no trouble whatsoever. For The Devil's Rejects, the hateful and horribly inept follow-up to the equally rancid House of 1000 Corpses, the filmmaker (and that's me being charitable) steals quite liberally from Wes Craven, Sam Peckinpah, and Oliver Stone, and expects us to buy it as crafty and canny homage. Sorry; I'm not buying.
The Devil's Rejects is about nothing. The story (and, again, I'm being charitable with these words) deals with a family of feral and nauseating serial killers who escape from a police raid and then ... oh, I don't know, stop at a motel to kill some people.
That's pretty much it.
So while it's obvious that a guy who re-named himself "Mr. Zombie" has a whole lot of love and affection for the horror genre -- that doesn't make him a good filmmaker. Frankly, Zombie-guy, you should have stuck to your novelty songs about inhuman women and haunted cars. Because as a filmmaker, you're just about one step better than Uwe Boll.
The guy actually seems to think that he's made a harsh, dark, and insightful horror film about the nature of evil (or something), when the simple truth is that The Devil's Rejects is not much more than 90-some minutes of shameless button-pushing and oh-so-edgy torture material. There's not one character in the movie you'll even remotely like, care about, or sympathize with. It's a carnival side-show full of thirty chicken-mutilating geeks, all of whom stare right into your eyes and chuckle while the blood and gore drip down their necks.
And save your emails, "Zombie" fans, because despite what you're probably thinking right now, you simply won't find a more rabid horror fan than yours truly. True, I pretty much hated House of 1000 Corpses, but I'm always willing to give a guy a second chance, and I was therefore actually quite psyched to sit down and enjoy The Devil's Rejects. If only Mr. Zombie had allowed me to.
This is a film in which we're asked to chuckle appreciatively and clap our hands in approval as a series of innocent bystanders are tortured, terrorized, and slaughtered. I felt like I'd been transported back to ancient Greece and asked to roar with laughter as a bunch of slaves were fed to the lions.
There's nothing even remotely scary, intense, disturbing, or exciting about this shitpile. If there were, well, I wouldn't be sitting here bashing it so loudly. Mr. Zombie has enough material here to fill perhaps one 15-minute short film, which is why The Devil's Rejects is packed with long and interminably stupid sections in which nothing happens. Occasionally the filmmaker acquires a delusion of Tarantino-esque creativity, so we are frequently subjected to conversations on "how to have sex with chickens" and "why it's so cool to stab people." I found myself laughing at the film with an alarming consistency, and whatever Rob Zombie was hoping to accomplish with this movie -- I can pretty much guarantee that he wasn't hoping people would be giggling at the desperate stupidity of the thing.
Directorially, the thing's an absolute eyesore. Zombie's "technique" involves nothing more than grainy filters, garish close-ups of rotting teeth and shit-stained underwear, and non-stop freeze frames. The screenplay sounds as if it was written by a semi-retarded fifteen year old who's obsessed with bodily functions and fully intent on squeezing the word "fuck" (or any conjugation thereof) into every single sentence.
The actors jump into the worthless material with all the enthusiasm that C-level has-beens can possibly muster, leaving a viewer to register nothing but relief when "Terri from Three's Company" or "Callahan from Police Academy" are eventually slaughtered and subsequently allowed to cash their paycheck. Sid Haig continues to humiliate himself as a disgusting clown-faced idiot, while Sheri Moon (that's Mrs. Zombie, thank you very much) is allowed to roam the movie, overacting mercilessly while creating a character you'll want to punch in the face about 14 times. But the director does manage to linger on his wife's ass-crack for minutes at a time, just so you know we're dealing with professionals.It's not the tone, the style, the approach, or the shamelessly pandering acts of violence that turned me off to "The Devil's Rejects." This ugly, sweaty, and aggressively pointless movie is nothing more than "Zombie's Greatest Hits," in which the deluded wannabe filmmaker has taken his favorite scenes from his favorite movies and squeezed them out (not unlike diarrhea) onto celluloid so that fans can appreciate the visual ugliness of rampant murder -- only without all that annoying subtext and insight of movies like "Last House on the Left," "Natural Born Killers," and "Bonnie and Clyde." It's not smart, it's not interesting, and (most annoyingly) "The Devil's Rejects" is not even remotely scary. It's an angry little portrait of bile scrawled haphazardly onto a big piece of torn and crumpled construction paper. Hell, at least most of the PG-13 horror movies TRY to scare you a little bit. All Zombie wants you to do is hoot, holler, and cheer as each new victim gets skewered while his stunningly annoying "heroes" get away scot-free. It's pretty damn sickening, folks, and not in a good way.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12301&reviewer=128
originally posted: 07/22/05 23:56:15
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 CineVegas Film Festival For more in the 2005 CineVegas Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Fantasia Festival For more in the 2005 Fantasia Festival series, click here.
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USA
22-Jul-2005 (R)
DVD: 08-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
13-Oct-2005
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