Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
The Devil's Rejects starts with the scene you always want at the end of a horror flick -- zombies ground under the wheels of a tank; the monster covered in napalm, burning; the demented, murderous hicks, holed up in their shit-hole shack, biting off more than their rotten teeth can chew. Unlike the cops who visited the Firefly house in House of 1000 Corpses, this squad, led by Sheriff John Quincy Wydell (William Forsythe), are some bad motherfuckers.
Mother Firefly is captured after a Kelly Gang shootout, with Rufus dead and Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), Otis (Bill Mosely) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) on the run. What follows is curiously hard to pin down, as much Bonnie and Clyde as 1000 Corpses. Wydell proves himself no less capable of brutality, including torture, recasting our villains as victims. One scene even sees Baby running away half-naked and vulnerable into the night.
But your victim-cred is limited when, scant hours before, you were engaged in torture, sexual abuse and murder. There's enough violence, and heinous enough violence, that the three never become truly sympathetic figures.
Ambivalent victimization isn't the only confusing aspect of the film. It's a road movie, but not a chase movie -- if anything, the driving scenes belong in a coming-of-age road-trip; most of them are characterized by nostalgia and good-natured humour. Spaulding's old friend Charlie (Ken Foree) is a shiny-suited pimp; their debauched stay at his disco whorehouse belongs to a different genre of exploitation entirely. And then there are the movie references, reaching their peak when Wydell brings in a film critic to explain the Marx Brothers references.
What does it mean? If you ask me, nothing: it's all in the intertext. You're torn between horror and sympathy; you want them to suffer for what they've done, but you're made to feel guilty for it. You're implicated in the violence; the subject is your own spectatorship -- and not just of this film, but all of them.
An excellent entry.
See also