The Devil's Rejects

I won’t be revising my opinion of House of 1000 corpses anytime soon- I barely remember it, but it’s firmly filed away as a piece of crap. A bloody piece of crap with a mean streak and some fun references, but shit by any other name…
My opinion of Rob Zombie, however, has proved to be completely wrong. His new film, while exploitative and self indulgent, was one hell of a pleasant surprise.

Picking up on the characters from the previous movie, it practically begins with the police surrounding the murderous Firefly family at their hideout/abattoir. A shootout ensues that neatly shows off some of the best things the movie has: mainly, it quickly establishes that this is not a horror movie. The intensity and confusion of the moment are shot with an economy that’s both admirable and incredibly effective. Oh, and it’s got one of the coolest things in the movie: a lead homemade bulletproof suit that needs to be seen to be believed. In the aftermath of the shootout, the patriarch of the psychopath clan gets offed, the mom gets captured, and the two ‘kids’ escape.
This sets the stage for all that follows: the kids try to regroup and figure out their next steps, with the help of their father, Captain Spaulding, who was outside of the hideout at the time. Meanwhile, the mastermind behind the raid, a sheriff hell-bent on getting revenge for his brother’s death at the family’s hands, relentlessly hunts them down. The movie remains viscerally entertaining the whole damn ride, escalating to a stunning climax set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird.

Visually, musically, and thematically, there’s a very strong 70s vive to the proceeds, and quite a few specific references to movies from that period (I got only a few, but there were undoubtedly many, many more). The violence is relentless and unflinchingly captured, the dialog is crisp and hilarious, and there’s just a laser-like focus, an intensity to the movie that runs throughout the whole thing- even when going out on a tangent. There are no easy outs, no cheap shots; all notions of good and evil are left behind, leaving only the apocalyptic confrontation between two brutal, amoral forces without anyone to root for.
The characters are memorable, with the sheriff and Captain Spaulding towering above the rest- Spaulding, an aging, fat clown who’s introduced when he wakes up from an erotic dream lying next to a repellently obese, sex-crazed dim-wit, has got to be one of the best characters I’ve seen in a long time. And don’t tell me he was in House of 1000 corpses. This movie is on a completely different league.