The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) I don’t deal well with the kind of grimy fly-infested grand-guignol horror that seems to be Rob Zombie’s stock-in-trade as a director. It’s a style that seems pointless to me, performatively disgusting in ways that don’t actually mean anything. As you’d expect, my reaction to The Devil’s Reject is not sympathetic. It’s an exceptionally unpleasant film, except that “unpleasant” would mean having some kind of reaction whereas this is more akin to overwhelmed ennui: So, the heroes are unrepentant murderers, the police are even worse monsters. And… then what? The direction is all over the place with freeze frames and slow motion, while the characters are well beyond parody and hard to take seriously. As shown by an out-of-place scene with a reviewer spouting off useless trivia, Rob Zombie clearly doesn’t like movie reviewers, so he shouldn’t be surprised that movie reviewers don’t like him back. The Devil’s Rejects does have great music, though. The accompanying documentary, 30 Days in Hell, is quite a bit of fun: it’s a making-of documentary that’s actually longer than the main feature, and it cleverly takes us through every single day of shooting alongside the actors and the crew shooting the film as they resolve the production’s problems on an ongoing basis. It actually makes the feature itself more endearing: it’s harder to dislike a film once you better appreciate the work that goes into making them.