The Devil's Rejects Just Don't Want to Die

Rob Zombie is an electrifying performer. If you've ever seen the rocker onstage, you'll notice a strict dedication to the macabre and the demented, and a loving affection for the standards and ideas of horror film. He thinks, acts and believes in his music cinematically, which is why it seems that his passion for performing would translate to filmmaking.

Well, Rob Zombie took one movie, but he's graduated from pop culture pastiche maker to genuine filmmaker with the galvanizing sick and twisted THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. While HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES is slick, fairly brainless material, knowledge of horror movie tropes and awareness of it's own roots heightened by some spectacular performances, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is a massive step up. Stinking of southern grunge and bloody desperation, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is as coarse and violent, as HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES is colorful and pointless.

Whatever nastiness HOUSE contained is upped in REJECTS. The difference here is that, with the baddies no longer in a position of power, the biblical brutality and violence on display is an equal opportunity defender. While the characters possessed a maniacal glee that bordered on comedic last time, this installment features the core Firefly family with their backs to the wall, reeling from a police siege on the literal House of 1000 Corpses that left many bodies felled by copious amounts of bullets.

On the run are Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Otis (Bill Mosley, channeling Manson via an appearance that resembles Evan Stone doing Rob Zombie), who take up salvation at a broken down motel hell, spending their time sadistically torturing a folksy country band. In the meantime, heifer-loving clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) is summoned, and his eventual proposition involves them hightailing it to Charlie's Frontier Fun Ride, a brothel run by Spaulding's "brother," the slick Charlie Altamont (Ken Foree, really great).

However, the Firefly clan knows trouble when they see it, in the form of raging vengeance seeker Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe, chewing hellfire). The brother of a victim from the first film, Wydell speaks of "walking the line" in bringing these hillbillies to justice, but a visit from the ghost of his own brother reveals that his entire family has a vigilante side, and it's not long before he's torturing the in-custody Mother Firefly (Leslie Easter brook, clearly insane) and enlisting the ruthless bounty hunters the Unholy Two (Danny Trejo, Diamond Dallas Page) in order to bring some southern justice to the film's endless dirt roads and rocky terrain.

Justice is a foreign concept in this macabre world, as the ambiguity of both the Firefly clan and Sheriff Wydell's aims is never once explicitly clarified. THE DEVIL'S REJECTS carries a lot of heft today, a world where you have heroes that murder senselessly no matter which country you live in, and the knee-jerk reaction is to suppose that the relationship between the demented, amoral Firefly clan and the Bible-quoting Wydell is that of terrorists cells and the President of the United States. But really, the conversation most likely gets derailed in favor of discussing who's who. THE DEVIL'S REJECTS has only a cursory relevance to today's global dialogue, but it's a far step up from HOUSE'S fairly arbitrary chaos.

As a filmmaker, Zombie still has his indulgences: given carte blanche by Lions Gate (who still owes us an unrated DVD of HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES). His affection for music video editing hasn't deserted him, and while it augments some of the stronger moments of the film (thanks to an excellent soundtrack), a few bits overstay their welcome. Also, one scene broadly attacking film critics stands out as a fairly errant jab, and represents a superfluous scene that could have been excised. Still, for most of it's runtime, THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is unnerving, violent cinema, casually terrifying and at times utterly iconic in a way that will make you forget a first film in this series (which most likely ends here) ever existed.