2) The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
Coming in at second place is Rob Zombie’s sequel to his directorial debut House Of 1000 Corpses.
I have to hand it to the guy, he knows how to craft a good horror movie, and he knows how to do it retro-style. I only just survived through House of 100 Corpses as I’m not the biggest fan of the horror genre, but it felt like an old 70’s exploitation film and while the premise wasn’t totally original, I could definitely appreciate what Zombie was trying to do.
The Devil’s Rejects however, was much more of an ambitious film in the sense that Zombie tried to mesh together a crime caper, a road trip film and a revenge thriller, and it worked quite well.
I will admit that Rob Zombie is a talented filmmaker, but this particular movie was even harder to sit through than his previous effort. I put it down to the fact that in the first film, the sick and twisted Firefly family basically stayed confined to their titular house and that’s it, you wouldn’t hear from them if you didn’t come a knockin’. In this one however, the Firefly family are forced to flee their house once a vengeful sheriff comes a knockin’ with some serious firepower. It is then that their killing spree begins on the open road.
What made The Devil’s Rejects hard to sit through is not only the degree of brutality and torture that is bestowed upon innocent people by the Fireflys, but also just how unconditionally evil they all are. Just when you don’t think it could get any worse, a poor woman is forced to wear the peeled off face of her dead husband and run out onto the road for help, only to get completely demolished by an oncoming truck. I understand that this is a horror film at heart, but this just tested my threshold time and time again.
The best description of what to expect from The Devil’s Rejects is illustrated in the following line said by the character Otis as he’s about to kill a victim: “I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil’s work.”