The Devil’s Rejects Remembered…
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The Devil’s Rejects could be the most over-the-top violent chase movie ever. I didn’t see this movie when it first came out because I thought it was too much, and I saw 1000 Corpses in theaters. The violence is enhanced by the setting. The hotel scene is in one room while Otis and Baby torment and kill a group of people, so that one’s especially intense. Also, the prison scene where the Sheriff kills Mama is also insane, proving all the characters are a group of crazy idiots, even the Sheriff. This over-the-top nature makes the movie one-of-a-kind. It also helps that the movie is chalk-full of indie actors with good dialogue.
There have been plenty of movies with villains as main characters, but I think this one is set apart. There’s also tons of strange crap in this movie that twists the movie standards and kicks expectations in the balls. Some critics missed the point because I remember back in the day, this movie was either labled as a horror movie or a sick trip. Maybe Zombie’s style is too over-the-top to be taken seriously, because only now after all these years do I see Zombie’s humor in his efforts.
The film turns on certain cliches and subverts expectations. Zombie also plays with the notion of rebellion and counter-culture by making the police just as evil, which helps equalize everything, so there’s actually no good guys in The Devil’s Rejects, but they certainly are charming, which is supposed to be sick. I can see Zombie chuckling to himself for trying to make audience sympathesize with a clown serial killer or his trash family.
Zombie fills the movie with a sort of demented humor, like inserting a bit about Groucho Marx. The Sheriff brings in a movie critic at one point, and the whole scene plays with the idea that The Sheriff is using a Marx expert to track down the Rejects. He loves Elvis, so he gets pissed off when this critic idiot insults “The King”. The whole point of the scene is not to enhance the plot, but simply to be funny and show the Sheriff is whacko Elvis fan, or just plain whacko. Zombie’s humor is way over-the-top, that’s for sure. He skewers the cliche of the Good Cop Hunting the Bad Guys with upteen scenes of police brutality, so that’s one cliche he puts to rest. He just kills The Sheriff anyway late in the movie, so Zombie is laughing at us again by offing the only “hero” the movie could ever hope to have.
At the end of the movie, we see some flashbacks where the Rejects are enjoying happier days, laughing and posing for camera photos. The scene moves back and forth from the present to these flashbacks, as the group prepares to charge headlong into a police barricade. Zombie stomps on the notion that we should have a happy ending in all our movies by using the bloody shoot-out to ruin our expectations set with these flashbacks, so there’s another cliche trashed right there. There’s about a half-dozen other examples of Zombie destroying cliches, but I will say that I remember it being a sick ride, but now I understand the point. Zombie loves to be subversive. He’s trying to be funny.
