The Devil's Rejects (2005)

Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects arrives in 2005 with the single-minded purpose of being unpleasant, and it succeeds with a grim efficiency few films of its era can match. The Firefly clan flees across a Texas that exists only in drive-in memory, pursued by a sheriff who degrades into something worse than his quarry. There is no thesis here, no lesson tucked beneath the carnage. The film is a violent western dressed in blood and southern rock, and it has no interest in telling anyone how to live.

Ken Foree and Geoffrey Lewis appear in supporting roles, and the film lets them work without comment, which is the correct approach and the only one this material invites. The cast is otherwise white and the setting is 1978, and the film treats both facts as scenery. Baby Firefly is a sadist, not a symbol. The violence done to her and to the other women is spectacle, delivered without argument. Bodies on screen exist to be mutilated. That is the transaction, and the film never pretends otherwise.

Critics of the day noticed the vacancy. Dana Stevens called it a trompe-l'oeil experiment with a curious emptiness at its core. Stephen King praised it for having no redeeming social merit at all. Both readings are accurate, and both function as compliments in the register this film occupies. There is no sermon in the final act, only a Cadillac, a hail of bullets, and Free Bird. We classify it accordingly. A picture this committed to refusing instruction has earned its quiet place in the ledger, filed under entertainment, filed under nothing else.

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