"Dear Mr. Zombie, why did you make your own daughter strip in your film?" - this is one of the many questions I wanted to ask Rob Zombie after watching this worrying, but sort of interesting film.
The tale revolves around a group of Satanists who are known as the Devil's Rejects: people so bad that the devil spat them
out of hell. They start off with a shoot out with the police, escape narrowly, before going all across the country to wreak havoc.
I would like to point out right now that I am not a fan of torture porn films; for me a film has to have some story behind it or it is a waste of my time. In this case, the film is sort of a half TP, half average sadastic horror flick. Some scenes involved one of the satanists fantasising about this guy's wife infront of him and forcing her to strip, Zombie's daughter getting naked, and a guy dreaming of sleeping with his own daughter.
Although many of these scenes are rather worrying, the film allround takes a rather light-hearted feel, making these satanists seem like a happy family trying to get at each other. One memorable moment was when two of the satanists want ice cream and the other doesn't so they all chant "tooty f***ing fruity" to annoy him until they get ice cream. Oddly enough, looking back on it, this does seem like Zombie attempting to say that satanists aren't all bad, which is probably true, but is not really going to do much except start controversy.
What makes the film avoid torture porn in many situations is the detective side of the film; they go over to the police and show what they've found and what they're doing. Unfortunately this then begins to go pear shaped when some of the officers turn out to be not very nice people.
Basically, this film seems to bring a good connection between the horrible mass murdering family and the audience, in the sense that nailing myself to my house is a good connection; it may be a good connection, but it's not doing anyone any good!
October 17, 2011
Top Critic
