The Devil's Rejects

The Devil's Rejects
Teaser poster
Directed by	Rob Zombie
Produced by	Rob Zombie Mike Elliott Michael Ohoven Andy Gould Marco Mehlitz
Written by	Rob Zombie
Based on	Characters by Rob Zombie
Starring	Sid Haig Bill Moseley Sheri Moon Zombie Ken Foree Matthew McGrory William Forsythe
Music by	Tyler Bates
Cinematography	Phil Parmet
Editing by	Glenn W. Garland
Studio	Cinelamda
Distributed by	Liongate
Release date(s)	July 22, 2005 (2005-07-22)
Running time	109 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$7 million
Box office	$19,390,029

The Devil's Rejects is a 2005 American horror film written and directed by Rob Zombie, and the sequel to his 2003 film House of 1000 Corpses. The film is about the family of psychopathic killers from the previous film now on the run. At the time of its release and in the years since, the film has garnered a cult following. The movie has many freeze-cam scenes over the characters.

Plot

On May 18, 1978, Texas Sheriff John Quincey Wydell (William Forsythe), and a large posse of State Troopers issue an S and D mission on the Firefly family for over seventy-five homicides and disappearances over the past several years. They begin a full-scale attack when the Firefly family fires on them. During the firefight, the family kills four troopers and Tiny (Matthew McGrory) goes missing, Rufus (Tyler Mane) is killed, and Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook) is taken into custody while Otis (Bill Moseley) and Baby (Sheri Moon) escape. Once out of their property, Baby pretends to be hurt in the middle of the road. When a nurse in travel stops to see what is the matter, Otis comes from behind and kills her with a knife. The two escape in her car and drive towards their specified meeting spot if all hell broke loose with the law at their home.

They head to Kahiki Palms motel, a run down desert beaten place to seek refuge from the law and huge media coverage. While at the motel Baby seduces Roy, part of the Banjo and Sullivan singing group. While he is off guard due to Baby’s sexual innuendos, Otis sneaks up behind him, holds him at gun-point and demands he take them back to his room where the rest of the band is resting minus their roadie, who is at the gas station getting beef jerky. Otis and Baby takes the band hostage in the hotel room and Otis shoots Jimmy the roadie when he returns.

Meanwhile, Baby's father Captain Spaulding, after being alerted by Baby about the raid, hits the road to come to the hotel to meet Baby and Otis. His car runs out of gas and Spaulding assaults a woman and scares her son taking their car in the process. Back at the hotel, Otis sexually assaults Roy's wife Gloria and Otis demands Adam and Roy to come with him on an errand.

Otis drives his two prisoners to a place where he buried some guns. While walking to the location, the two prisoners put up a struggle and hit Otis in the head with a large tree branch. This knocks him down, but Otis soon regains control of the situation, shooting one of them and killing Roy while he is on the ground praying to God. Back at the motel, Adam's wife Wendy tries to escape by going to the bathroom. Gloria attempts to rebel only to be killed by Baby. Wendy runs out of the motel only to be caught by Captain Spaulding who knocks her out. Otis returns, and all three leave the motel together in the band's van.

The last member of the band is accidentally killed when she runs out to the highway to seek help. She could not see too well, because she is wearing Banjo's face as a mask that Otis kept as a souvenir. The maid comes to clean the room, and opens the door of the bathroom to see the grisly murder scene, with blood smeared all over the wall in a Manson-like assault, where “The Devil’s Rejects” is written on the wall in blood. He calls the pair of amoral bounty hounters "Unholy Two", Rondo (Danny Trejo) and Billy Ray (Diamond Dallas Page), to help him find the Fireflys, by making them search for the Firefly's associates. They search, and find that there is another associate, Spaulding's brother, Charlie Altamont (Ken Foree).

Meanwhile, Wydell calls for a movie critiziser to find out about the names of the Firefly family, later discovering that they are all characters from Groucho Marx's movies. He slowly begins to lose his sanity and his mind when Mother Firefly reveals that she murdered his brother. After having a dream in which his brother urges him to avenge him, Wydell pretends to seduce her, and stabs Mother Firefly to death. The surviving Fireflies gather at a brothel owned by Charlie, where he offers them shelter from the police. They throw a party and they all celebrate over their freedom.

After leaving the brothel to purchase some chickens, Charlie is threatened at gunpoint by Wydell to give up the Fireflies, all of them at his house at midnight. With the help of a pair "Unholy Two", the sheriff takes the family back to the Firefly house where he delights in torturing them with similar methods they had used on their own victims. He nails Otis' hands to his chair and staples crime scene photographs to Otis's and Baby's stomach, beats, and shocks Captain Spaulding and Otis with a cattle-prod, and taunts Baby about the death of her mother, speaking about her death.

Wydell lights the house on fire and leaves Otis and Spaulding to burn while taking Baby outside to murder her. Charlie returns, changing his mind, to save the Firefly family, but is brutally axed by Wydell. It is only the last minute intervention of Tiny that saves the Firefly family; Tiny returns and snaps Wydell's neck. The family shares a brief tearful reunion as Tiny walks into the blazing house. Otis, Baby, and Spaulding escape in Charlie's Cadillac, leaving Tiny behind.

The film ends with the trio driving down the road, badly injured but alive, with Otis driving, and Spaulding and Baby sleeping, trying to flee the country, but they run into the middle of a police barricade, with no sound heard except Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." As the song climaxes, Otis wakes up Baby and Spaulding, they grab their guns, Baby and Otis their revolvers, while Spaulding takes his rifle. They go forward in a final blaze of glory, refusing to surrender, and being shot to death by the police. In the scenes, it is shown the videos of Spaulding, Baby and Otis together as a family. The order of the deaths, as shown in freeze-frames, is Baby, then Otis, then Spaulding. The scene then blacks out.

Cast

Main article: List of Rob Zombie characters

• Sid Haig as John "Captain Spaulding" Cutter
• Bill Moseley as Otis B. Driftwood
• Sheri Moon Zombie as Vera-Ellen "Baby" Firefly
• Ken Foree as Charlie Altamont
• Matthew McGrory as Earl "Tiny" Firefly Jr
• William Forsythe as Sheriff John Quincey Wydell
• Tyler Mane as Rufus "RJ" Firefly Jr
• Leslie Easterbrook as Mother Firefly
• Dave Sheridan as Officer Ray Dobson
• E.G. Daily as Candy
• Michael Berryman as Clevon
• Danny Trejo as Rondo
• Diamond Dallas Page as Billy Ray Snapper
• Brian Posehn as Jimmy
• Kate Norby as Wendy Banjo
• Priscilla Barnes as Gloria Sullivan
• Lew Temple as Adam Banjo
• Geoffrey Lewis as Roy Sullivan
• Tom Towles as George Wydell
• Deborah Van Valkenburgh as Casey
• Ginger Lynn Allen as Fanny
• Daniel Roebuck as Morris Green

Production

Unused poster featuring Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon and Sid Haig.

When Rob Zombie wrote House of 1000 Corpses, he had a "vague idea for a story" about the brother of the sheriff that the Firefly clan killed coming back for revenge. After Lions Gate Entertainment made back all of their money on the first day of Corpses theatrical release, they wanted Zombie to make another film and he started to seriously think about a new story. With Rejects, Zombie has said that he wanted to make it "more horrific" and the characters less cartoonish than in Corpses, and that he wanted "to make something that was almost like a violent western. Sort of like a road movie." He has also cited films like The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands as influences on Rejects. When he approached William Forsythe about doing the film, he told the actor that the inspiration for how to portray his character came from actors like Lee Marvin and Robert Shaw. Sheri Moon Zombie does not see the film as a sequel: "It's more like some of the characters from House of 1000 Corpses came on over, and now they're the Devil's Rejects."

Zombie hired Phil Parmet, who had shot the documentary Harlan County USA because he wanted to adopt a hand-held camera/documentary look. Principal photography was emotionally draining for some of the actors. Sheri Moon Zombie remembers a scene she had to do with Forsythe that required her to cry. The scene took two to three hours to film and affected her so much that she did not come into work for two days afterward.

Rejects went through the MPAA eight times earning an NC-17 rating every time until the last one. According to Zombie, the censors had a problem with the overall tone of the film. Specifically, censors did not like the motel scene between Bill Moseley and Priscilla Barnes, forcing Zombie cut two minutes of it for the theatrical release. However, this footage was restored in the DVD version.

Soundtrack

Main article: The Devil's Rejects (soundtrack)

While Zombie himself is a musician, he decided to go with more southern rock to create the mood of the film. The soundtrack itself was notable as being one of the first to be released on DualDisc, with the DVD side featuring a making of featurette for the film and a photo gallery.

Release

Box office

The Devil's Rejects was released on July 22, 2005 in 1,757 theaters and grossed USD$7.1 million on its opening weekend, recouping its roughly $7 million budget. It grossed $17 million in North America and $2.3 million in the rest of the world for a total of $19.4 million.

Critical reception

The film had mixed reviews with a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus "Zombie has improved as a filmmaker since "House of 1000 Corpses" and will please fans of the genre, but beware -- the horror is nasty, relentless, and sadistic."; and a 53 metascore on Metacritic. Prominent critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the film and gave it three out of a possible four stars. He wrote, "There is actually some good writing and acting going on here, if you can step back from the [violent] material enough to see it". Later, in his review for The Hills Have Eyes, Ebert referenced The Devil's Rejects, writing, "I received some appalled feedback when I praised Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, but I admired two things about it [that were absent from The Hills Have Eyes]: (1) It desired to entertain and not merely to sicken, and (2) its depraved killers were individuals with personalities, histories and motives". In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers gave The Devil's Rejects three out of four stars and wrote, "Let's hear it for the Southern-fried soundtrack, from Buck Owens' "Satan's Got to Get Along Without Me" to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," playing over the blood-soaked finale, which manages to wed The Wild Bunch to Thelma and Louise".

In her review for the New York Times, Dana Stevens wrote that the film "is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro film-making. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C+" rating and wrote, "Zombie's characters are, to put it mildly, undeveloped". Robert K. Elder, of the Chicago Tribune, disliked the movie, writing "[D]espite decades of soaking in bloody classics such as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I Spit On Your Grave, Zombie didn't absorb any of the underlying social tension or heart in those films. He's no collage artist of influences, like Quentin Tarantino, crafting his movie from childhood influences. Rejects plays more like a junkyard of homages, strewn together and lost among inept cops, gaping plot holes and buzzard-ready dialog".

Horror author Stephen King voted The Devil's Rejects the 9th best movie of 2005 and wrote, "No redeeming social merit, perfect '70s C-grade picture cheesy glow; this must be what Quentin Tarantino meant when he did those silly Kill Bill pictures".

Awards

• Spike TV Scream Awards:
  • Won: Best Horror Film
  • Won: Most Vile Villain (for the Firefly Clan)
  • Nominated: The Ultimate Scream
• Fangoria Chainsaw Awards:
  • Won: Killer Movie
  • Won: Relationship from Hell (for Otis B. Driftwood and Baby Firefly)
  • Nominated: Best Butcher (Villain) (Sid Haig)
• #7 on Bravo TV's 30 Even Scarier Movie Moments

External links

• The Devil's Rejects at the Internet Movie Database
• The Devil's Rejects at AllRovi
• The Devil's Rejects at Box Office Mojo
• The Devil's Rejects at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Devil's Rejects at Metacritic