The Devil's Rejects isn't as much a sequel to Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses as it is a remake, sort of the Evil Dead 2 to Evil Dead. Even though it has the same characters and it kinda sorta follows the events of the previous film, seeing House of 1000 Corpses in preparation for The Devil's Rejects is likely to only lead to unnecessary confusion. House of a 1000 Corpses is really a dreadful mess and a profoundly stupid movie. There were a number of great moments of filmmaking in it. There was one sequence that I was impressed with in particular: a massacre scored to a twangy version of "I Remember You" and climaxing in an execution rendered in what Jeremiah Kipp described as a "God's Eye View.” But none of this really added up to anything. The film had little impact; it was about as incomprehensible and as shallow as that same year's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. It was basically Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle in grindhouse drag.

The film suffers from an affliction common to many first-time filmmakers, particularly those whose fame affords them a disproportionate degree of creative freedom. Having never gotten a chance to make a film before, Zombie had put everything that he wanted to see in a movie into House of 1000 Corpses. Oftentimes this works; Citizen Kane and Gummo are unparalleled masterpieces of cinema, and The Virgin Suicides and Buffalo '66 would both get very strong defenses from me. But when this self-indulgence never really adds up to anything more than a cinematic masturbation, well, I suppose that we really shouldn't be surprised. Ultimately though, it was necessary for Zombie to make House of 1000 Corpses. He was so filled with a lust for moviemaking that he really needed to just jack off and clean out the pipes so to speak, get it out of his system. Now with The Devil's Rejects Zombie is ready to fuck.

The Devil's Rejects has all the passion of House of 1000 Corpses and it is a focused and controlled passion; it's aiming toward something. I have rather recently come to define my criteria for great cinema as being momentum: mass times velocity. The Devil's Rejects has momentum up the wazoo. This film has the impact of a cannonball being shot into your stomach.

Zombie is obsessed with ‘70s grindhouse cinema, and one of the startling things about The Devil's Rejects is that he has actually improved upon some of the classics. There is an entire sequence in the film where the band of killers take over a hotel room of civilians and proceed to physically, sexually and mentally torture them for their (and presumably our own) amusement. Otis, the shaggy Jesus/Charles Manson lookalike in the group, forces a middle-aged woman to strip to her skimpies. He taunts her husband by rubbing his gun on her body and sliding it down her panties, before forcing her to perform fellatio on him. Her humiliation is capped off by having to tell the rest of the group how much she enjoyed that attack. Later, when Otis is taking the husband out to be executed he wisecracks that he hopes his wife didn't rust the barrel. In a somewhat tamer scene, Otis' slutty sister Baby refuses to let her captor pee until she slaps the molested wife. "And not a love tap either," she snarls, "hit her hard!"

To find again material this strong we would have to go back to Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. I have a theory about Wes Craven. I believe that he is a very warm, funny, compassionate guy who while making Last House on the Left really sunk down really deep into his psyche and discovered that he has the capacity for atrocity. Having had an unhappy but not particularly abusive childhood, Craven doesn't have the need to commit sexual violence, but the capacity for it is there swimming around in his brain, and this really terrified him. Enough so that he actively suppressed it and never again graced us with anything like the rape and torture scenes in Last House on the Left. It terrified him during the making of Last House on the Left also, prompting him to give screen time to a couple of bumbling cops and to score the film with goofball H.G. Lewis-esque country music in an attempt to counter the demons that he had unleashed onto mankind.

While the tortures he portrays are not quite as potent as those in Last House on the Left where strings of saliva attached themselves to the face of one of the raped teenagers and another is forced to pee her panties at gunpoint, Zombie has done little to neutralize the power that they do have and as a result The Devil's Rejects produces a smoother high. As with House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie injects a good deal of humor into the film; but unlike House of 1000 Corpses (or Last House on the Left) it is never at cross-purposes to the depravity. There is a difference between using humor to distract from the weight of the terror and using humor to twist the knife in, and The Devil's Rejects does the latter. The film is clearly laughing with the serial killers and at their victims, giving it a clean and honest immorality.

Zombie's dialogue could probably be described as poor man’s Tarantino. A brothel sign advertising, "We've been VD tested/clean pussy/cum again" gets down the form of Kill Bill's "Pussy Wagon" keychain if regrettably none of its significance. Zombie doesn't quite exhibit the degree of hipster uncoolness that Tarantino does either. He has his Otis character tell a captive, “Consider me fuckin' Willy fuckin' Wonka! This is my fucking chocolate factory! You got it? My factory!” Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Not quite on the level of “Happy Days” and “Green Acres,” is it? Zombie isn’t nearly the refined cineaste that Tarantino is either. The hotel movie in The Devil’s Rejects is Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster whereas in Pulp Fiction it’s The Losers. The latter certainly has more resonance thematically and aesthetically; although I am a great admirer of Bride of the Monster, Wood’s monster movie retains a sort of dum-dum formalism that works at cross-purposes to the effects that Zombie is trying to produce.

The truth is, Tarantino likes a lot of crap and while I’m glad that he prompted me to discover Brain DePalma’s early stuff like Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, other favorites such as Death Rides a Horse or the Richard Gere version of Breathless more or less deserved to get buried. So do Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Tobe Hooper’s Life Force. (And fuck, how could Richard Linklater’s bullshit Dazed and Confused make his Sight and Sound top ten ?!) A film recommendation from Rob Zombie (or for that matter, Tarantino colleague and nemesis Roger Avary) is perhaps more likely to be a strong one (Zombie tellingly tells The Onion AV Club that he is only interested in “good movies”). But ultimately what matters in montage cinema is not the quality of the individual source materials but the manner in which they are used. I haven’t seen The Losers, but I’ll readily assume that it is an inferior film to Bride of the Monster. (I’d be hella surprised if it is as good or better.) That hardly matters though, because even if Tarantino’s affection for The Losers is unjustified he has an excellent understanding of its strength as an incoherent text and he knows exactly how to use it fruitfully.

But with all that said, Pulp Fiction is getting to be one of those unchallenged classics like The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Psycho, The Godfather or Star Wars; movies that you’re cute for saying you hate and even cuter for saying you like. As thus it is probably not very good criticism to say this movie isn’t as good as Pulp Fiction or Rob Zombie isn’t as good a writer/director as Quentin Tarantino. I mean Christ, The Devil’s Rejects isn’t Citizen Kane and Zombie isn’t Orson Welles either. And anyway, I think that Zombie at least deserves credit for appropriating Tarantino's hilariously adolescent obscenity as well as his abundance of pop culture references; most Tarantino rip-offs only seem to understand the latter. I have to say that this may very well be the first time in some fifteen years that I've heard the sing-song ditty, "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!" That has to count for something.

Anyway, my original point in bringing up the dialogue was to say that Zombie only gives these hilarious quotable lines to the killers. Whatever else I say about it, there is great significance and weight to idea of Otis calling himself “Willy Wonka” and that “this” (the kidnapping and eventual execution) is his “fucking chocolate factory.” Quite unlike Johnny Depp’s version of the character Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka had a sort of casual omnipotence that suggested that everything and everyone else in the film existed within a context defined by him. Otis’ consciousness of his status as a filmic anti-hero places him in the same realm as both Zombie the Filmmaker and us the Audience. We become peers. This is his movie and everything in it exists relative to him. The only reason, basically, that his victims exist is to be killed by Otis and the other killers. Zombie does something that the Nightmare on Elm Street films have done from time to time; whereas the victim believes that they are existing in a serious thriller, the killer understands that they are really existing in a post-modern satire. The killer’s broader scope of the situation accentuates his omnipotence and in the inverse, accentuates the futility of the victim’s hopefulness. Right after Otis delivers that “Willy Wonka” line, he is attacked by a wooden board by the soon-to-be-deceased. They are trying to escape, but as the scene ends their efforts prove to be in vain. Now when Otis kills them he’s not going to be quick.

At no point in the film does Zombie explain why the Devil’s Rejects do the things that they do, and as I understand it, that is true to the nature of most serial killers. You saw that quality especially in the work of John Wayne Gacy. Utterly amoral and unintellectual, he presented murder as something so basic that it precedes psychological motivation. The reasons for killing go unexplained in The Devil’s Rejects because it is sort of a given; if you have to ask you’re never going to get it, and what’s more, you are probably more like the victims than the killers.

One of the major discussions surrounding The Devil’s Rejects is whether it glorifies violence. The short answer is: “yes.” Now, I will concede that Zombie does not sanitize the violence and he presents it in all its ugliness, or at least the absolute threshold of ugliness allowed by the R-rating issued by the MPAA. But while that at least ensures that we’re discussing this on a level playing field, because the violence is ugly it not automatically follow that it isn’t glamorous. I mean, does hardcore porn serve as a deterrent to sex? For some of us it does, but you know, for others when they don’t give you the cumshot they’re ripping you off.

The killers are given a disproportionate amount of screen time compared to their victims, better lines, and even more depth. They are also given much more dignity in death. One of the victims is hung up on the coat rack in her hotel room with a dried human face tied to her head. When the maid comes by the next morning to clean the room, Leatherface Girl comes unhinged and chases her out of the room before blindly moving in front of a speeding truck and exploding into bloody chunks. The scene is profoundly callous. The victim is denied the help she is needed because she is mistaken for one of the killers; a horror movie twist that is clever in a purely mechanical, conceptual way, but on a certain level is effective at denying her the nobility inherent with victimization. And while she exhibits real terror and real fear, her death is reduced to a gross-out visual joke. The scene is constructed in a way in which we instinctively laugh at the punchline, thus definitively tying our sympathies and perspective in with the killers.

When the Devil’s Rejects are killed at the end of the film, they go out in a blaze of glory, charging at a police barricade with guns a-blazin’ and with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” on the soundtrack no less. Death for the Devil’s Rejects is a means towards martyrdom and it would follow deification. What exactly are they taking a stand for, thus justifying the use of that word “martyrdom”? Well, the divine right to rape and torture bitches and kill their husbands and boyfriends, of course. The anti-heroes of the late sixties (Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke and of course Easy Rider) always died at the end as they represented an ideal of freedom that the fascist State found threatening.

The Devil’s Rejects is the prototypical seventies film that the seventies never actually got around to producing. John Waters described his Pink Flamingos as an anti-hippy movie for hippies, a concept that The Devil’s Rejects illustrates and illustrates much more lucidly. What happens when the counterculture runs out of culture to counter? When one argues for people to become “free” the argument necessitates that serial killers and rapists are able to do “their thing” as well. As soon as some moral code is developed a second dominant culture is created which then necessitates a second counterculture. In order to truly be free, the individual must surrender all external forms of morality and create a personal one, even/especially if that excludes the idea that human life is a precious commodity.

The Devil’s Rejects are given a foil in Sheriff Wydell, played by the character actor William Forsythe. Seeking to avenge the massacre of a bus full of cheerleaders as well as the death of his brother, a fellow man of the law, Wydell kidnaps the Devil’s Rejects and takes them to their former hideout for a bit of their own medicine. Wes Craven rather crudely mishandled the revenge of the victim's family in Last House on the Left. Neither exciting nor particularly satisfying, it doesn't quite have the gut punch that the original murder/rapes did. I think that Craven was aiming to make an “anti-violence” picture, and while he was able to stretch out the original torture and milk it for terror he was cautious about having us enjoy or buy into the revenge; he wanted to sort of make it perfunctory and useless by being sloppy about it. Zombie however is not making an anti-violence movie, and he does little to suppress the kinky thrill inherent in a bit of the ole eye-for-an-eye justice of the Old Testament. By the time he gets to work on the Devil’s Rejects, we begin to get the urge to yell out possible methods of torture in the same way we would yell out advice to the teenage girl who goes upstairs while there is a killer on the run. (If you ask me, I think that he should have put broken glass in Baby’s boots and stapled them on before he let her run off.)

This revenge stuff is interesting and perhaps even necessary. Without it we could probably write off The Devil’s Rejects as simply being disgusting, but with it we are even more further implicated into the film’s nihilistic worldview. We have to admit that violence, particularly in the context of revenge, is both deeply satisfying and enormously pleasurable. Just make sure, of course, that you’re the oppressor and not the oppressed. Because Forsythe is such a powerfully iconic actor, Sheriff Wydell has great weight as an antagonist to the Devil’s Rejects. He represents law, order and civilization: everything that the Devil’s Rejects hate. He has no sexual appetite, paying little mind to the advances of the Devil’s Rejects’ captured matriarch Mother Firefly and taking little real pleasure from the violence he perpetuates. For him, it’s borne from sheer rage.

The Devil’s Rejects never quite elevates this id vs. superego/Apollo vs. Dionysus dynamic to the level of high art as Tim Burton did with the original Batman, but there is enough of it to flesh out the ideological foundation of the Devil’s Rejects. Make no mistake; Wydell exists only in context to the Devil’s Rejects. He serves as a vehicle for their persecution and martyrdom, and it would then follow as a means to justify their depravity. The Devil’s Rejects are eventually saved and Wydell murdered by a deus ex machina figure. He goes out like a complete and utter punk, even more evidence to suggest that Zombie’s sympathies lie exclusively with the Devil’s Rejects.

When I say that The Devil’s Rejects is an honestly immoral film, please note that we haven’t really had an honestly immoral film since Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick’s film, ironically enough, has been the only version of the Anthony Burgess novel to omit the 21st chapter. In both the Clockwork-esque Trainspotting and Fight Club (and especially destructively in American History X), the antisocial antagonists “grow up” at the end and join and/or protect the society that they were fighting against. The first two acts are a celebration of anarchy and cretinism only to cop out in the third with an appeal to humanism and decency at the end. This isn’t just cowardly, it’s hypocritical and dishonest; like the gangster pictures of Hayes era these films peddle subversiveness while insisting that they are essentially moral works all along. The Devil’s Rejects is decidedly not cowardly, hypocritical or dishonest. It has the balls to back up its depravity. Nobody changes or grows a conscience, because the film believes that they were right and justified in their original actions. This is, finally, a film that legitimately challenges the political superficiality of its core 18-24 audience.

All the same, there is something preventing me from canonizing The Devil’s Rejects, in the way that I can canonize Trainspotting and Fight Club. I saw it, I was very impressed and very shook up and could produce a worthy review out of it; but the film doesn’t quite have that elusive X factor. Thinking rather hard about it, I think that it is both in spite of and because of their moralism that Trainspotting and Fight Club work as well as they do. The last shots of those two films go beyond mere impact; they linger, swimming around and rejuvenating the mind and body. They’re moralistic, but their moralism leads to a feeling of soulfulness and poetry.

I’m not looking for a ray of hope or sunshine from this movie, but I guess I wish that there was at least one moment where it could be quiet, contemplative and sad. This may be why there is nothing in The Devil’s Rejects that is as good as the torture scenes in Last House on the Left, despite it being, on the whole, a much better film. Then again, I realize that had the film had such a moment it would be exhibiting some sort of square feeling of sympathy toward the victims, and would compromise the well-kept immorality of the piece.

I know that I’ve downplayed the virtue of morality in film elsewhere, but I suppose that it proves to be a more valuable commodity than continuity. Without any sense of morality, The Devil’s Rejects proves to be sort of impenetrable. Rob Zombie has proved with this film that he is a talented filmmaker and essayist, but he is not an artist. To make art, I think, one has to have a soul, and well, the living undead do not have souls.