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Devil's Rejects, TheRob Zombie's debut film House Of 1000 Corpses was a grizzly, low-budget homage to slasher flicks and creature features that achieved notoriety when its original studio backers dropped it deeming it too disturbing to release. At least, that's one version of the story. The other might have had more to do with the fact that it was rubbish: a sloppy, mish-mash of ideas ripped off from other films and stitched together into an unfocussed tribute to the horror movies of yesteryear.
By his own account Zombie was given free reign to do what he wanted with this bigger-budget follow-up, but he's still obviously in thrall to the past. The Devil's Rejects is an attempt to make an exploitation film in the mould of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Alas, despite his use of desaturated 16mm film stock, Zombie has failed to grasp what made those efforts genuinely horrifying and delivers instead a stylised sick flick that revels in sadistic thrills and misogynistic violence.
A sequel to House Of 1000 Corpses, it finds that film's amoral, serial-killing Firefly family - brother Otis (Mosely), sister Baby (Moon) and clown-faced pop Captain Spaulding (Haig) - on the run after the police storm their body-part strewn home. As they hit the back roads of Alabama, indulging their passion for murder and mutilation as they go, local lawman Sheriff Wydell (Forsythe) hunts them down, determined to exact revenge on them for killing his brother.
The film takes great pleasure in showing innocent victims being tortured and tries to mine horrific murders for laughs with ribald dialogue and excessive gore, which leaves us in little doubt where Zombie wants our affiliations to lie. With no satirical slant to any of the mayhem and no attempt to provide audiences with any kind of moral centre (the sheriff is just as sadistic as the killers), he casts his protagonists in a disturbingly heroic light. Indeed, when he soundtracks the final, excessively long stand-off between cops and killers with Lynard Skynard's 'Freebird' (all nine minutes of it) his real purpose becomes clear: The Devil's Rejects is actually Easy Rider for those who think Charles Manson best represented the ideals of the 1960s.
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