The Great Texas Chainsaw Massacre Grave-Robbery reaches something of a grisly climax in Rob Zombie’s relentlessly revolting sophomore effort.
Indeed, The Devil’s Rejects is stitched together from all manner of cadavers; the queasy pan-sticked clown horror (be warned, fellow coulrophobics) of Funhouse and It, the backwoods uncanny of Deliverance and the nihilistic fuck-it-all braggadocio of Peckinpah, with shameless, er, homage to The Getaway and The Wild Bunch in particular.
There’s little doubting that the director knows his gore and frankly we’d expect nothing less from a guy who named his band after a Bela Legosi film. If the reference points are sound, so too are Mr. Zombie’s attempts at facsimile. Shot on grainy 16mm in hazy highway heat, the movie is so authentically '70s in aspect, one might easily mistake it for an extended episode of The Rockford Files were it not for all the sadism.
Reanimating the ghoulish Firefly family (75 murders and rapes and counting) from Zombie’s garish debut, House Of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects takes the show on the road. When the monstrous clan (Haig, Moseley, Mrs. Zombie) find themselves hunted like the murderous dogs they are by a vengeful sheriff (Forsythe), they hole themselves up in a flea-bitten motel where hostages are taken, raped with pistols and dispatched in brutal fashion until the Big Fat Wild Bunch climax.
More horrid than actually horrifying, one might forgive Rejects its lack of originality (it is, after all, a horror movie) if it wasn’t such a godawful mess. Utterly haphazard in both structure and tone, the film neither knows where to go or who to root for. Scenes arrive in scattershot order, like some kind of low-falutin’ avant-garde jigsaw puzzle. Forsythe’s sheriff veers wildly between Robert Mitchum in Night Of The Hunter and Yosemite Sam – he’s good, then he’s moustache – twirling evil, then he’s just plain ridiculous. Similarly, Zombie can’t quite decide whether the Fireflys are fiends or glamorous outlaws, although his missus’ arse-crack commands a remarkable amount of screen time.
As bewildering viewing experience, it’s as close to unnecessary electric shock therapy as cinema gets, if that floats your boat.