| MANSON FAMILY VALUES : Rob Zombie's 'The Devil's Rejects' [7/10] |
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| Saturday, 30 July 2005 | |
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A decade after From Dusk till Dawn, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are reportedly planning to collaborate again on Grind House, a portmanteau tribute to the unashamedly crude, brief, often grisly B-movies that delighted drive-in audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Trouble is, White Zombie lead singer Rob Zombie has beaten them to the bounce with his gleefully unpleasant The Devil's Rejects, a western-flavoured sequel to his cult hit House of 1000 Corpses. You don't need to have seen Corpses to follow Rejects - an economic expository into sketches in the murderous antics of the 'Firefly' family in mid-seventies Texas: harpy-like Mother (Leslie Easterbrook, replacing Corpses' Karen Black) and her children Otis (Bill Moseley, looking like a lankier Charlie Manson) and Baby (shapely blonde Sheri Moon Zombie**, wife of the writer-director); plus the clan's oft-absent paterfamilias, the ghoulishly made-up clown Captain Spaulding - played, in an entertaining and unexpectedly nuanced turn, by Blaxploitation veteran and Tarantino regular (Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol.2) Sid Haig. Captain Spaulding's first scene sets the tone - waking with a start from a fantasy in which he has sex with a good-looking prostitute who then proceeds to shoot him in the head, he's asked if he's had a bad dream: "Yeah... Mmm... 50/50," comes his groggy reply. The story sees the Firefly clan (who vividly illustrate the dictum that 'the family that slays together, stays together') being hunted by vengeful Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe) whose lawman brother (Tom Towles, seen in a dream-sequence*) was one of their countless victims. Mother is soon captured and taken into custody, but the remaining trio prove harder to track down: Otis ("I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's work," he confusingly proclaims) and Baby hide out in a dusty motel, where they brutally terrorise a pair of folk musicians and their wives after cold-bloodedly gunning down their roadie. The children later meet up with Daddy, and seek refuge at the whorehouse operated by long-time pal Charlie Altamont (Ken Foree) - but the increasingly unhinged, scripture-spouting Wydell is hot on their heels... As it proceeds on its merry way, The Devil's Rejects becomes in effect a grand guignol comedy expansion of Witchfinder General 's final scene - where nice-young-man Ian Ogilvy's fury at Vincent Price's villainous Matthew Hopkins turns him into an axe-wielding, gore-crazed lunatic ("YOU TOOK HIM FROM ME!!!", the blood-spattered Ogilvy repeatedly bellows after Hopkins has been mercy-killed by an appalled Nicky Henson). As well as being a terrific historical horror film, Witchfinder General was, of course, the greatest of that limited genre, the British Western - and Zombie has spoken of how he sees The Devil's Rejects as an old-school 'revenge western' in the Sam Peckinpah tradition. Like Peckinpah, Zombie loves slow-motion (showing off the grain of the suitably scuzzy Super-16mm film) - especially for very violent sequences - and he deploys this trickier-than-it-looks technique with considerable skill throughout. He's even better with freeze-frames, as with the opening titles which outdo David Gordon Green's rather more respectable Undertow in paying slavish tribute to the movie-making styles of three decades ago (see the finale of Robert Aldrich's 1971 deliriously lurid The Grissom Gang for perhaps the finest of all seventies freeze-frames). But whereas Undertow was scored by Philip Glass and operated under the spell of Terrence Malick, Zombie's tastes are much more populist and down-and-dirty - he treats us to a variety of contemporary soundtrack hits (including, incongruously, David Essex's 'Rock On') - and generally indulges himself in classic movie-geek-turns-moviemaker fashion. Indeed, it's interesting that The Devil's Rejects is being released so soon after Neil Marshall's The Descent - both Marshall and Zombie are long-time hardcore horror fans whose debut films (Corpses and Dog Soldiers) did surprisingly well financially, enabling them to push the envelope much more boldly with their followups. This means that Zombie can populate his cast with in-joke faces like The Hills Have Eyes' inimitably scary-looking Michael Berryman, Halloween's P.J.Soles, Geoffrey Lewis from Salem's Lot, George Romero favourite Foree, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer's Towles and even veteran cult heroine Mary Woronov, although the latter is conspicuously wasted in a nothing role (Bela Lugosi, star of the original White Zombie, pops up in a found-footage cameo). Corpses's success means Zombie also go all-out to offend those of a 'sensitive disposition' and also exercise the world's censorship bodies, who found much to excite them in House of 1000 Corpses: the motel scenes with Baby, Otis and the folkies are pretty hard going, while film critics the world over may take exception to the buffoonish, moustachioed chap brought in by the cops when they twig that the Fireflys take their names from Groucho Marx characters - leading to a priceless exchange between the critic and Wydell over the relative merits of Groucho and Elvis, which will surely have Tarantino gnashing his teeth in envy... In the wake of the Kill Bill sprawl, however, Tarantino would do well to learn from the brisk effectiveness of The Devil's Rejects's relentlessly (and, given the milieu, accurately) expletive-heavy ("there is no fuckin' ice-cream in your fuckin' future!") screenplay. The structure is simple but effective, Zombie first setting up the Fireflys as beyond-the-pale amoral psychopaths, then forcing the audience to ponder whether they deserve the vicious retribution Wydell has in store for them. The answer is, basically, yes - but it's evident from quite early on that none of the major characters in The Devil's Rejects is in any way deserving of our sympathies. At least Wydell has the excuse that he's motivated by revenge for his deceased brother - and, unusually given the era, his encounter with Altamont (after the latter has been debating the merits of 'chicken-fucking' with a roadside redneck in an enjoyable non-sequitur scene) indicates that the Sheriff, whatever his other faults, isn't actually a racist. It would seem a mistake, however, to try to read too much into The Devil's Rejects - one American critic has even gone so far as to describe it as a 'Republican victory lap'. Zombie is very precise about locating the action in the late summer of 1978 - but it's unlikely he had the Jonestown massacre, the birth of the first test-tube baby, the unrest in Tehran, the Unabomber's first outrage or the sentencing of either the Son of Sam or Manson associate Leslie Van Houten in mind. The summer of 1978 was probably when video-cassette recorders penetrated Zombie's childhood home in Haverhill, Massachusetts, thus enabling the then 12-year-old Master Cummings to feast his eyes on zombie, cannibal and grind house classics to his little heart's content. Neil Young 31st July 2005 THE DEVIL'S REJECTS : [7/10] : USA (US-Ger) 2005 : 'Rob ZOMBIE' (i.e. Rob Cummings) : 109 mins seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 29th July 2005 - press show [originally rated 7/10, but downgraded to 6/10 after further reflection, 10th Oct 2005; rating of 7/10 restored, after yet further reflection, 11th April 2006. Indecision is a wonderful thing... I think...] * Zombie isn't breaking any new ground here: the Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature (Drabble and Stringer, 1986) offers the following definition of 'Revenge Tragedy': A dramatic genre that flourished in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period, sometimes known as 'the tragedy of blood,' Common ingredients include: the hero's quest for vengeance, often at the prompting of a murdered kinsman [my emphasis] or loved one; scenes of real or feigned insanity [check]; a play-within-a-play; scenes in graveyards; scenes of carnage and mutilation, etc. [check and double-check!]. Many of these items were inherited from Senecan drama, with the difference that in revenge tragedy violence was not reported but took place on stage. ** For the sake of symmetry, Sherie Moon Zombie's next film should ideally see her co-starring alongside Moon Unit Zappa and, erm, The Reverend Sun Myung Moon. |
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