Well, after all the hype I have to say that I was expecting a hell of a lot worse in terms of brutality and explicit violence, and couldn’t really see what all the fuss had been about?
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Rob Zombie’s ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ but I respected it and thought it deserved it’s cult status. I similarly feel that this movie deserves credit for not going the easy route on it’s road trip to hell.
I didn’t expect the same movie, and I didn’t really want to see it either, but I have to say I was a little annoyed that the characters had undergone such drastic transformations. Don’t get me wrong, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig and Sheri Moon Zombie all give excellent performances, and overall the changes probably suit the movie, but there were a number of situations where I expected them to react a certain way (based on their personalities in the first film), which never happened.
Everyone did a great job and it was good to see such a solid ensemble of classic genre actors all working together, but to be honest by the time it came to the finale I was desperate to see them all die.
I felt terribly sorry for poor little Priscilla Barnes and Geoffrey Lewis but I never felt that the film was excessively graphic or violent or disgusting. You see far worse on the news!!
Unlike the first film, there were a number of things I could really pick out as flaws here and they were the awful CGI (it’s pretty bloody pathetic when you have Robert Kurtzman and Wayne Toth on set and you need to use CGI blood) the predictable nature of certain sequences (i.e. Wendy running onto the main road and Baby’s saviour at the Firefly house) and the film was also sadly derivative of other movies, and unfunny in certain places (such as the scene with the Groucho Marx fanatic).
The film did add some welcome humour between the family and there were the odd couple of moments when you did think ‘eww that’s quite sick actually’ but in all I wouldn’t be sad if I never saw it again.
I was almost on the verge of shouting ‘enough already’ before Rob Zombie managed to end the movie the way he wanted (in a rather roundabout way) after first giving his fans the ending they desired.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Not as accomplished as it’s forerunner. The Devil’s Rejects is quite obviously a labour of love for Rob Zombie but aside from the odd visual treat and the cool score by Tyler Bates (which we don’t hear enough of) it was nothing to write home to momma about.
