Brutal 'Devil's Rejects' is all style and no story

Friday, July 22, 2005

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

"The Devil's Rejects," the sequel to heavy-metal-star turned exploitation filmmaker Rob Zombie's debut feature "House of 1000 Corpses," leaves the rural backwoods for the sun-baked desert highway and trades the blaring heavy-metal soundtrack for Southern-fried 1970s rock, but otherwise picks up where "Corpses" left off.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS

DIRECTOR: Rob Zombie

CAST: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie,

William Forsythe

RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes

RATING: R for sadistic violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use

GRADE: C

LINKS/TRAILERS
· Official site

This time the hillbilly clan of thrill killers -- brother Otis (Bill Moseley), a stringy-haired, B-movie Billy Bob Thornton version of Charles Manson; sister Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), a giggly hillbilly belle in cut-offs who treats torture as foreplay; and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), their demented clown father -- are on the run from a vengeance-minded sheriff (William Forsythe).

Otis delivers what passes for motivation: "I am the devil and I am here to do the devil's work." Thus they find time to torture and murder a few luckless souls during their escape before a weirdly satisfying twist that turns Sheriff Wydell -- the only admirable figure in the entire film -- into the brutal instrument of an Old Testament God smiting the devil.

It's the framework of an exploitation tribute Tarantino could love ... with a little polishing and a lot more backbone. Zombie has become a more accomplished filmmaker since his debut feature and the surface details are spot on, from the chewy dialogue to the tough, stripped-down visual style and arid imagery to the use of freeze frames, optical zooms and low-tech transitions (as immortalized on 1970s TV and low budget movies).

Unfortunately, his stories haven't matured with his storytelling, and in some misguided inspiration he even attempts to turn his homicidal trio into a 21st-century "Wild Bunch" of rebel anti-heroes.

Zombie is content to revel in nastiness, brutality and exploitation as he imitates his beloved sadistic strain of '70s horror movies and fills the screen with cult icons (from Sid Haig to "Dawn of the Dead" star Ken Foree to "The Hills Have Eyes" poster child Michael Berryman and beyond). But he fails to tap into the primal horror of his inspirations, leaving "The Devil's Rejects" a canny but hollow pastiche.