Halloween (2007)

There was a time back in the mid ‘00s where, for some reason, movie studios felt the need to totally revamp the old horror classics that nobody ever had a problem with to begin with. But the studios really wanted to do updated versions, even though nobody was asking. And I get it - Hollywood has always lived on the backs of remakes. We have timeless stories and we make them new again for new generations. However, it really seems like Rob Zombie was trying to kill the story of Halloween with this remake rather than keep it going.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Scout Taylor Compton, Sheri Moon Zombie, Malcolm McDowell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

This is an awful, repulsive piece of trash with nothing really good about it. It’s seriously just amazing how bad this really is. Zombie wasn’t bad at making pseudo-Texas Chainsaw rip offs like House of 1,000 Corpses, and The Devil’s Rejects was legit a great movie, but it was this movie where he showed his true colors - i.e. he can’t do anything else. But if you want screaming, cursing rednecks and lots of sleazy sex scenes, you’ll be in paradise here. And if you want that, I'll know to stay the fuck away from you.

The only question is, what does any of that have to do with John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween? Nothing. It has nothing to do with it.

We start off with something that doesn’t make sense from even the first line of dialogue: hillbilly rednecks living in the midwestern suburbs. Yup, the Myers family in this is apparently a bunch of constantly unpleasant jackasses, led by the stepfather Ronnie, this greasy looking motherfucker who looks like he belongs in a trailer in Alabama, but is instead in the suburbs in Illinois now. I guess Zombie really, really needed to put in guys who look like him! It’s like a security blanket or a pacifier for an infant.

Yup, this is how Halloween should open up, said no one ever.

In the first few minutes, Ronnie says he thinks his own stepdaughter's ass is hot and says Michael’s mom is jealous of her own daughter’s ass. That’s how we’re starting off this movie. A pair of adults talking about a teenage girl's ass. Ah, it’s refreshing to start off with absolutely zero expectations or integrity. How could you get any worse, movie? That was a rhetorical question. The movie gets way, way worse.

It’s fucking amazing how unpleasant this is to watch - like, really, even if you don’t care that it has nothing to do with Halloween, it’s still bad on every level. What’s entertaining about watching a bunch of white trash rednecks scream and break shit? I guess the point is to show how bad Michael’s home life is, but frankly all that’s missing here is the cops on speed dial for the next time there's a domestic incident in which one of the kids or the mom, uh, fell down the stairs. Yeah. That's it.

If you never pictured the hulking behemoth Michael Myers as a whiny, stringy-haired 10-year-old, well, now you're safe and will never be afraid of him again. Thanks for fucking nothing, movie.

Michael's mother is of course played by Sheri Moon Zombie, because the entire cast of every Rob Zombie production goes like this: 12 big hairy ugly dudes, and Sheri Moon Zombie wearing a bikini top most of the film. That sounds like the beginning to a terrible porno, which makes sense because Sheri's only role in every one of these films is to show off her tits and ass.

If it seems weird to you that Zombie constantly casts his own wife in these films just to let the whole world see her naked, well, I guess some marriages are just never meant to be understood.

And yeah, as most criticisms of this movie mention - it’s an origin story for Michael Myers, one of the most recognizable horror movie villains. Not to quell the creative ambitions of Rob Zombie (haha...hahahaha….ha ha HA…), but if we needed an origin story, we probably would have gotten one before this movie came out in 2007. The scary thing about Myers was that he was pure, unexplained, unstoppable evil. Explaining him and giving him an actual character is like shining a light under the bed and telling your kid there’s nothing there, it’s all in her imagination.

But seriously, even if you get past that, just think about it: if you were to give Michael Myers an origin story, and show it on screen, why the fuck would you want it to be this one? We don’t need scenes of him whining in the bathroom or being bullied at school. Why would we ever need that? Even if you wanted to know more about why he became a killer, these are very poorly written scenes where every person he meets is a total unrepentant, over the top dick to him. They’re all basically just excuses for Zombie to go for the shock factor of having people say fuck around little kids and show boobs. That’s not interesting to watch.

I want to see all my horror slasher icons as bratty children. That makes the REAL terror shine through...

But hey, he gets his revenge by killing a bully who was mean to him in the woods!

When they say fight back against your bullies, I’m pretty sure they just mean throw a punch back. Not ambush them in the woods and beat them to death with a stick. But it’s okay, because this is never mentioned again. Yes, really…

The whole movie so far has just been the equivalent of a really obnoxious guy screaming in your face. Every scene is full of greasy, grimy looking people swearing and talking about sex in the most annoying ways possible. But hey, at least we get to see the realism in how Michael finally snapped and became a killer! He’s sitting there eating candy in his house, and then, with no provocation, he gets up and starts slaughtering his whole family.

This is a ridiculous scene where it plays "Love Hurts" over top him sitting on the sidewalk by himself - just awful. It's baffling to me that anyone thought this would be touching. It's as emotional as watching a pet fish flushed down the toilet.

It was the fucking candy corn after all. Damn candy corn.

Yup, that’s it. That’s what Rob Zombie wanted to show you to account for a ‘realistic’ backstory! I mean, I guess it can happen in real life. But the way it’s shown here isn’t particularly realistic, subtle or well written - he’s sitting there eating candy, and then he goes and kills people. I guess he should have had an apple or rice or something. Maybe then he would have been fine.

And yeah, he kills his stepfather, his sister’s boyfriend AND his sister this time, as opposed to just his sister like in the original. That isn’t a big deal, but I just find it funny, like the movie is the bratty little brother of the original trying to outdo all his big brother’s stories. “You had one person killed, huh? Oh yeah, well I can have THREE people killed and in more bloody ways! And I’ll have child Michael wear the Michael Myers mask when doing his first kill!”

Nobody ever wanted to see a midget cosplaying Michael Myers, movie.

So then we get like forty minutes of him in a mental hospital with Dr. Loomis, who is played by Malcolm McDowell. He looks less like a doctor here and more like an aging rock star your dad would be friends with and your mom would disapprove of because he always sleeps on your couch blind drunk after a show down at the county fairgrounds on a Wednesday.

Hey, don't judge him. He's trying to clean up. He's just in a bad place right now.

These scenes all pretty much go like this: Michael asks to go home, Loomis tells him he can’t because he’s a terrible child, Michael cries. Rinse and repeat for like over 30 fucking minutes. Except for one scene that changes up the formula, where a janitor played by Danny Trejo of all people gives Michael a random pep talk about not letting the hospital get him down. I don’t even think Trejo was part of the cast. He was just walking by the set wearing a janitor costume for no reason, and delivered this speech unprompted.

"Remember, kid, don't let them get you down."
"Okay, Mr. Janitor. I don't know why you're telling me this, but okay."
"So why are you in here, kid?"
"I killed my whole family."
"Really? Oh, well forget what I said. You're fucked."

Oh, and this is apparently the worst hospital in the world, as they give metal forks to patients who have murdered people, and train their nurses to make rude comments that provoke the patients to murder them! Ha ha ha! Oh wait, I guess that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

The REAL origin story of the film is telling how mental hospitals learned to stop letting patients have metal forks.

After that, I guess they learned their lesson and kept him locked up for the rest of his life. But hey, what could have really been done about this? You know, things happen!

Until about 15 years later, when a couple of wretched security guards decide to rape some innocent girl who was brought in as a patient. They drag her into Michael’s room and do it there. It’s extremely unpleasant and grating to watch, as they scream “fuck” and “faggot” through the whole thing and obviously the rape itself is extremely awful to watch, and nothing I’d even want to subject my worst enemy to. There is no point to this scene. And it takes way too long. So, congrats on that one, Zombie, you can film a fucking awful rape scene. Hang that award on your wall.

Seriously, what am I supposed to get from this? I guess he really wanted to make Michael Myers the good guy, because I don’t think anyone in the audience is sad that these rapist assholes got murdered. Nothing about this scene or anything else so far has actually been scary so much as fucking gory and awful to look at - neither of those things are compliments. A gonorrhea infection is also awful to look at, for a comparison point. This does not make a good movie.

My only real conclusion has to be that Zombie wasn’t interested in making a horror movie, because this is not a horror movie. This is porn. It’s porn for people who like watching serial killer films and who get off on reading about Jeffrey Dahmer or some shit.

Sigh. So I guess Michael kills everyone else in the hospital, including Danny Trejo, and breaks out. After like, an hour and a half of all this unwatchable, unpleasant, unscary bullshit, what more is there to do? Regurgitate the original 1978 classic, of course!

Seeing this poster on a Google search while you have this remake on would be the only way you'd ever be reminded of the original while watching this piece of shit.

Yes, really - an hour and a half in, we get introduced to Laurie Strode finally. She’s played here by Scout Taylor-Compton, who doesn’t seem like a bad actress. But her first scene has her miming being molested by making over the top sex noises and playing with a bagel, and I died inside just typing that sentence.

You know, it doesn't matter if I even explain this scene more. It would still be stupid.

Her whole character doesn't even make sense. She's a girl next door type who makes jokes to her parents about child molestation! She's an outgoing peppy chick who gets inexplicably shy like a different person entirely when her best friend asks if she has a boyfriend! These things could be fine if written better, but in this movie, I think it's safe to say Zombie isn't in tune with how teenage girls act.

Well, that bagel-child-molestation thing would be bad no matter what. Seriously, what the fuck?

The whole thing just kind of plays out like a dumber, trashier version of the 1978 one, with several scenes just being shot for shot the same. It’s full of really shitty changes from the original. Like when this one girl and her boyfriend just finished having sex. In the original one, it’s just a dumb, harmless scene - they had sex and she tells him to get her a beer, and he gets killed by Michael. Here, though, she’s a total bitch to him and seemingly can’t stop being rude even for one second just because the sex was bad.

Christ, even her face is annoying to look at. I'm sure she's a nice person, but this character is just so bad in this movie.

I’m not saying that’s unrealistic - though the dialogue and writing suck - but it just points out what’s wrong with this. This wasn’t a change made for some great change to the overall story. It was just because Zombie seemed to want to make everything super gritty and "realistic," which mostly just comes off as dumb as fuck in this. It comes off silly, tired and dated. Making people shittier and ruder isn’t being realistic, it just shows what a small minded view you have of people.

The final chase scene is extremely boring and lame. It goes on for fucking ever. Like seriously I could have read a few chapters of Infinite Jest by the time this goddamn scene ends. The original movie’s chase scene wasn’t night and day from this one, but this movie has been completely unwatchable poison up to this point, so I guess it’s just hard to sit through more of its fat rolls of “plot.” There’s a moment at the end when you think it’s over - Laurie does her whole “was that the Bogeyman?” line, and Loomis replies. But then…

Yup! It’s still going. You hack ass piece of fucking shit. JUST STOP! Sorry for the tasteless profanity. I got possessed by the spirit of the movie there.

It finally ends, after like twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the Myers house in another stale attempt at a chase scene. The least this movie could have done was end sooner, but no, we don't even get that. We have to sit through Zombie's unique vision - a dull, dime-a-dozen chase scene that anyone could have filmed. Woo hoo... Anyway, Laurie finally kills Michael and THEN it's really over!

Wow, was that all? After two hours of rednecks screaming the word “faggot,” unnecessary violence, rape scenes and people being horrible to each other for no reason, I really want more. I think Rob Zombie really did capture what made the original a classic. I’m surprised he ended it at only two hours myself! I know I could have watched at least another two hours of this tasteless, irredeemable bullshit.

A lot of people talk about how this remake ruined the original’s point by explaining Michael Myers’ character, and they’re right. The original movie was only scary because of how mysterious Michael was, and how he was this unstoppable evil force who just descends randomly on a small town. It was the arbitrary, random nature of it that made it scary. Here, once Zombie explains it all, it’s just a bland serial killer upbringing story that has as much charm as reading a Wikipedia article on Ted Bundy.

But even if you don’t care about that, the movie is still complete shit. This is an annoying, irritating movie on every front. It’s visually grimy and grungy, annoying to listen to because every character constantly spews "fucks" and "faggots" every other line in awful redneck accents and even the violence and sex can't save it, as neither one of those things is even remotely enjoyable to look at here. The movie is not even remotely tense, scary or atmospheric. The writing is woefully slow-witted, blunt and dull, so they can’t even fall back on ideas in the script and claim the gratuitous sex and violence was an artistic decision. It feels more like a dumb 15 year old’s attempt at scaring his mom and little sister because they made him go to church.

This movie fucking sucks, and Rob Zombie fucking sucks. The Devil’s Rejects was a fluke. This is all he really has to offer.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Lords of Salem (2012)

Plots are actually kind of overrated. Hell, why bother having one at all when you can just have weird images and lots of screaming? For a horror director, this is almost essential now, as we all know the best plots were either used in the past or stolen from our minds by alien probes. Those are really the only two options, so it's better not to even try. So who else can save us from this plight but Rob Zombie? I mean, if you can't trust movies made by the equivalent of your high school bully who used to shove your head in a toilet, you can't trust anybody, man.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Jeff Daniel Phillips

IMDb

Co-written with The Observer and Michelle.

This was the last Rob Zombie film as of this writing, and no one really saw it because who would, after seeing the Halloween remakes he did? As much as I hate to admit it though, this is a better movie than either of those remakes, even if only by a little bit. But that won't stop me from making fun of it!

We start this off with a bunch of witches in the 1600s screaming and cackling, because when Tumblr hasn't been invented yet, I guess you gotta entertain yourself somehow.

"Look at my hands! They're somehow the only part of my body that's clean!"

This goes on for waaaay too long, but fortunately after that we get introduced to our main character, Sheri Moon Zombie.

Literally the first shot you see of her; I am not kidding.

Boy, he really isn't wasting time, is he? Two Rob Zombie cliches in the first five minutes – his wife, and his wife's naked ass.

She's playing Heidi, a radio DJ who has a dog, I guess. That's about the extent of her character. I guess the story is that she sees a weird figure across the hall from her at the apartment she thought was abandoned – what? A character in a horror movie sees something that might be just in her mind? Stop the presses!

But what is the dialogue like? Will it be a flurry of swearing like in every other movie he's done? Well, the first human interaction is with the old lady landlord who Heidi asks about the figure she saw in the other apartment. The landlord responds no, there's no one in there, but she's just glad she got rid of the last tenant who lived there, who “was a dog,” she says. Then she reaches down and pats Heidi's dog and says “no offense,” you know, just to make sure she isn't stepping on any toes.

"Rrruuuffff! Too late! Offense taken!"

Well, I'm convinced. Heidi goes to work and hangs out with another Ken Foree role and this other guy, who I'm pretty sure is getting ready to join ISIS. Even if he isn't, though, I'm positive he can't get through airport security quick enough to catch his flight.

These three are apparently a bunch of radio hosts who do silly things like play sound effects and have conversations with each other! Oh wait...those are normal things radio hosts do. Well, shit. I guess they get a strange vinyl record in the mail for Heidi, which turns out to be this weird noise that makes Heidi uncomfortable to listen to.

But that isn't a big deal for now. For now it's time for Heidi and Mr. Beardo over there to hang out at her house and re-enact scenes you've seen in every indie comedy flick:

Oh yeah, dance party in a horror movie! That sets the mood.

And it may look like she's cooking something, but don't be fooled – she's just swirling that beige-colored slop around to give the appearance of cooking.

The next night she comes home and winds up hanging out with her landlord's sisters, one of whom is a palm reader who I'm sure will be living in a shitty motel working at a Circle K in a year...I mean, she flat out says most of the lines on Heidi's palm don't mean anything to her and she only looks at one of them. Isn't that like being a math teacher and refusing to teach anything above sixth-grade-level multiplication? Somehow I don't think there are thick enough cloaks and mirrors in the world to hide that much bullshit. She tells Heidi to get in touch with her dark, sexual side or some bullshit like that.

Yes, get in touch with your dark, sexual side - palm reading psychics are kind of like issues of Cosmo after all.

I also love the landlord's exasperated cry of “you need to stop overdoing that psychic act; it's annoying!” after Heidi leaves. Yeah, I guess annoying would be one word to describe it. Maybe they should hire this lady to be casting director for Rob Zombie's other movies. She could just sit there and call every other performer in House of 1,000 Corpses annoying. And in Halloween II she could probably just kill Rob Zombie and improve the movie.

On the show, they interview an old man who's written a book about witches. They ask him if there were any “real witches,” sort of as a joke, and he answers, very deadpan, that there are no such things as real witches.

"There's also no such thing as the Easter bunny."

Wellp, that settles that! Movie over.

Later on, Heidi has a very surreal nightmare in which she goes into the room from Se7en and finds this:

Man, the previous tennants left half a can of butter, a roll of toilet paper and their giant glowering angry red cross. How inconsiderate.

Riveting. Then outside, in a hallway that already looks like it's out of The Shining, she runs into a grimy, naked old lady who looks like she also belongs in The Shining.

Bah, she's just part of the nudist convention going through town at the time. No biggie!

Then Heidi goes to a church the next day, intending to have a quiet and reflective day with her neglected ole' buddy J.C., but the priest shows up and starts talking to her instead. How is it in these movies that there's always a priest hanging around an empty church even when there's nothing going on? Don't they ever do anything else? Do they go out to buy groceries and chain-link-fence the church up until they get back?

"Why are you in here at any random time the protagonist in these movies come into a church?"
"Simple, my child - I am bound by blood to stay in this church forever."
"..."
"Yes, it's really quite horrific and depressing."

Anyway, conversation with the priest turns into a rape scene, which is such low-hanging fruit I could probably grab it from here in stupid old Florida, but I'm not going to.

Use your imagination...

After that, it's time for exposition, with that old man who they had on their radio show, who is suspicious of things going on because the script needs someone to investigate witches and shit like that. How do you think this went in the writers' room?

“Rob, I know you wanted this to be nothing but psychedelic brain-fucking imagery, but I really can't even tell what's going on, and I'm supposed to be the scriptwriter! I think we need to shoehorn in some kind of exposition-y plot device!”

“I think it's good the way it is. I always wanted to make a movie with nothing but naked witches and images I saw while half-dead in a drugged stupor. I'm fulfilling my dream!”

“Yeah, but we already hired Bruce Davison for the role! That'd be a lot of wasted money otherwise.”

“...alright, throw in some really generic scenes where he discovers stuff about the witches in the past being related to Heidi. That ought to be good enough, right?”

“Eh, sure. Why not?”

The problem with this, of course, was the obvious – the conversation just took place between Zombie and the drunken ghost of what remains of his own conscience. He was just sitting in an empty room talking to himself there.

After that shit is over and you're falling asleep, we get scenes of Heidi getting sicker and sicker and going home to get pushed around in a wheelchair by the three witch sisters who run the place.

Now they can skip the lines at Disney.

They take her back to that creepy Se7en-style room, only this time it's actually the palace Versailles, apparently. Heidi somehow has corpse paint on like she's in the worst ICP cover band in the world, and gives a double-handjob, I guess, to the appendages of a Cthulhu-like monster which we never really see.

That's the same face the entire audience has after watching the rest of the movie, too!

Apparently, this is her tipping point into madness, as she then spends all her time half-asleep on the couch, unable to move. Oh please, this is just what people do after a bad breakup. I'm not impressed. It would be more intimidating if she just reverted to her past life and started making women slap each other for the chance to go to the bathroom.

That bearded dude calls a few times, and has a sort of incoherent conversation with Heidi about their sort-of romance going on, which might be compelling if we really knew anything about either character. But I guess that wasn't the important part of the film.

We also get this scene, where Mr. Exposition Man comes over to try and figure out what's going on. He was smart enough to find out Heidi was related to the witches from the past, but apparently his Sherlock Holmes powers ran out there, as he doesn't seem to have a clue that the three old ladies are the bad guys here. "I mean, they act about as subtle as a clown wielding a machete, but fuck, I was totally surprised!"

Is it any surprise that they kill him afterward? Oh, and they don't do it with magic witch powers or anything cool like that. They just beat him to death with a frying pan, and no, I am not joking.

"Why did we put that cloth over his face anyway? It's not like anyone's going to come in here right this moment. I mean it's a movie - that would never happen."
"Sssshhhh...."

Oh well. Farewell character we won't ever remember the name of!

Beard-O takes Heidi out to this concert of the “Lords of Salem” band, who we never really see. Or we do see something, if watching a drug-fucked psychedelic orgy on screen counts as actually watching a band play. Seriously, I think some of these images are what hardcore right-wing Christians think the rest of us are doing on weekends.

It's cool to act like you're riding a bucking bronco when you're really just sitting on a goat who doesn't care.

Boy, Gene Simmons is hard up for cash these days.

Worst Eyes Wide Shut party ever.

There are also some more scenes of fire and naked witches and babies covered in blood and all kinds of shit. Then we see Heidi can really rock those white contact lenses they sell at the Halloween discount costume store. And that's just kinda the end of the movie. Hooray?

"Oh yeah, raided the $1 bin at K-Mart, now we're ready to trick or treat!"

Oh, well we do get a few "flashback" style scenes with her playing with the dog.

Now I see the point: the dog was the main character of the movie all along!

This was...well, better than most of Zombie's other movies. It at least tried some new things here and there, and it did show that he can write other things than rednecks and people screaming at each other, or Venn diagrams of the two things overlapping. This at least tried to set up a bit of character and atmosphere, and I did like the lightning, colors and visuals of it all – it was a very nice looking film full of spooky Halloween-esque ambiance, so that was fun.

The problem was that it just wasn't really a movie so much as a collection of cool looking images. It was kind of like a scrapbook of images from the mind of a character from a Dario Argento film. Zombie was definitely going for that vibe here – that super old school, retro vibe trying to imitate Suspiria, Inferno or any number of Lucio Fulci flicks, as well as The Shining for that matter. But it just didn't have any kind of real story to it. Everything that happened just felt incidental – like, oh, really, Heidi was a descendant of these witches and somehow never moved away from Salem for all these years? And she just so happened to be in the right places (the radio station, her apartment with the witches as landlords) for all this weird shit to happen to her? Well, what a small world after all!

The movie ends before we really get any sense of purpose behind what happened. There isn't really enough meat on the bones of this story to carry it beyond “curious” to actually good...the Fulci and Argento flicks, despite being similarly fever-dream-induced like this, at least had a sense of flow and narrative to them, and characters that kinda moved the story along. Here, once Heidi gets under the spell of these witches, or whatever it is that happens to her, the story stops cold and it just starts being about creepy imagery rather than a creepy story. That's the real difference here. For a similar but better modern horror movie, I'd really recommend House of the Devil.

But eh, at least this would probably be good if you watched it while high off your ass. Which is the real barometer for quality of any movie, when you think about it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Devil's Rejects (2005)

February is a time when you're supposed to be all thankful and mushy and shit about people you love. Sometimes, those people are serial killers and necrophiliacs. Don't judge them; that's just the way life works at times. They deserve love too.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

In a time when most movies are judged by the standards of people who have never raped someone's corpse, The Devil's Rejects came out to prove that, yes, deranged psychotics do deserve their own fair representation in cinema, just like all those other minority groups like black people, gay people and transgender people. We have to move toward a broader and more open-minded environment for everyone. And that's why I do this blog. To promote open mindedness! Yup...not takin' it back at all...

We start this off with a corpse dragged through the woods, which I think is kind of the equivalent of a "Beware of Dog" sign for any movie. If you can't handle this, well, you better go the fuck back to watching James Wan movies, I guess. Or whatever you're into. I don't discriminate on these things.

I'm undecided on whether not being able to handle this is good or not.

We then get the Firefly family, who are not a happy-go-lucky band of space travelers, but instead a gang of psychotic killers. They get raided by the police. During this, Mother Firefly tells her daughter Baby, played by Zombie's wife Sheri Moon, that she loves her and has been thinking about when Baby was...well, a baby. I guess that isn't too hard because of the name association.

But wait! We saw them earlier with a bunch of corpses in their beds! And anyone who knows the previous film House of 1,000 Corpses knows they're a bunch of evil sick psychos! How are we supposed to be drawn into their familial affection for one another?

Wait, I know – it's because Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up. That's how we know we're watching art.

Mother Firefly is arrested, but Baby and her brother Otis, played by Bill Moseley, escape. Otis, for those not familiar with this movie already, is a truly sick puppy. He's the kind of guy you'd expect to see in the background of a Slipknot concert, smoking shitty cigarettes and drinking, I dunno, Pabst Blue Ribbon, or something. The kind of guy who'd be driving a truck with raised wheels and flames on the hood and would beat you up in the parking lot for looking at him wrong while your girlfriend watches, thinks you're kind of a pissant anyway and have been asking for this your whole life, and considers leaving you for her friend from work who wears just the right amount of Old Spice.

Maybe they'll run into the Duck Dynasty guys out here somewhere...that'd be a mercy killing for the world...

Yeah, something like that. On second thought, I could have said “guy you'd see at a Rob Zombie concert” and been that much more accurate, and taken up less words at that.

We also get introduced to images like this, which burn into your brain even more than the dead girl from earlier, because our society has fucked up priorities.

This is Captain Spaulding, a crazy clown who ran a gas station road sideshow in the last movie and in this one, well, I guess he just fends off the sexual horny advances of his equally-fat wife. I guess the best way to describe this character would be: he's the kind of dude you'd see at a gas station at 11 in the morning buying a 24 pack of beer and cigarettes even though he was just in there last night, too. Then maybe you find out he's got a box of hardcore bondage snuff porn out in the garage.

He finds out about the raid on the house and heads out to meet Otis and Baby, who we learn are his children in this movie. It is a small world – murderers beget other murderers. He steals a car from a mother and child, but not before threatening the kid to come up with a reason he thinks clowns are scary, or else he'll come back and kill the kid and his mother. What a fun clown quiz game.

"Gee, mister, I guess I'm scared of of clowns because they threaten to kill my family! At least that's what the pee running down my legs tells me right now."

Easiest quiz ever!

Meanwhile, Otis and Baby kidnap a traveling country band and their girlfriends to hide out in their motel room. Not wasting any time, they do the sensible thing and force one of the guys' wives to strip and then violate her with the barrel of a gun.

Which, I guess, was the most integral part of this scheme...

Seriously, though – this has to be one of the scariest scenes I've ever seen in a movie. This is real fucking horror. Bill Moseley in this scene, and most of the ones that follow, just delivers this amazingly fucked up performance and you are really just scared shitless the entire time, because he seems like he really fucking means it. Am I really praising a scene in which a woman is traumatized beyond repair like this? Eh, on second thought, might not be the first thing to bring up at a cocktail party when I'm discussing movies.

Otis takes the two country musicians out into the desert to dig up some guns, all the while quipping snarkily about how their taste in music isn't up to what he expected. Somehow I'm not surprised by this – I mean, this guy's head has to be kind of a trip, huh? Equal rage at the cops chasing him and at shitty pop country music. But to be fair, I do think those two things are about equal in any respect. So I can see where he's coming from.

The musicians get wise on him however and try to kill him, but that doesn't go so well. My favorite scene here is when Otis is standing over the older guy and forces him to start praying to God. Otis jokingly (?) acts like the wrath of God is about to come down buuuuuut then does a “Psyche!” moment and instead declares that he is the Devil, here to to the Devil's work.

Y'know, I am fucking astounded Otis has never been caught before or got the whole family caught before now. I mean, the guy just takes every opportunity to flaunt his absolute evil in any situation. I'm surprised he doesn't just go apeshit on some poor fuck at a grocery store. “What'd you say to me? WHAT'D YOU SAY? I AM THE DEVIL! BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!” “Uh, sir, I was just trying to go to my car! I didn't mean to bump into your grocery cart!” That's always a pain in the ass for the Firefly family because that's more blood they have to wash out of Otis's clothes.

But apparently in Rob Zombie's world, being a huge asshole psychopath just makes you invincible. Which really does explain a lot about his later work, come to think of it...

Anyway. Back at the motel, Baby makes the two women slap each other in order to allow one of them to go to the bathroom, which is either every basement dwelling Reddit user's fantasy, or a serial killer's methodology put into practice. Then one of the women grabs Baby's gun and points it at her, though there's no bullets. This is all just leading up to the best knife throwing scene in the movie:

Yup! I guess the knife just...somehow slipped through the Fourth Dimension and killed her despite the fact that you'd need to have Hulk-level strength to pierce the bones to that extent at that angle. I guess being the director's wife gives you superpowers.

Captain Spaulding finally gets there and Otis gets back with the younger country musician's face cut off, clearly having been in a Buffalo Bill-ish mood all day and needing to quench that thirst. They tie the one surviving girl up and then put the skinned face on her like the world's worst Halloween mask. Since the face is of her now-dead boyfriend, I guess you could argue they're just that much closer together now.

Not sure if I should put a trigger warning for this or not...nah, it's fine.

And yes, I did just make that joke. About a girl wearing her skinned boyfriend's face. I guess I really am going to Hell now. Hooray for desensitizing! The next morning, the maid finds a nice morning wake-up call:

"Eh, I've seen worse. This isn't nearly as bad as when the Rolling Stones stayed at this motel."

The one surviving girl with the dead skin mask runs out into the street and is immediately hit by a truck. We then get a scene where the best of the best coroners looks at the body and gives his prognosis...

"Hmmm, yup, I think she might be dead."

The next scene is Baby, Otis and Spaulding in the car talking about getting ice cream. Otis doesn't want to, and they have a quibble over it, but a strategically placed scene cut awards them their sugary treat. Also in this scene we get the best line in the movie, an immortal utterance that will no doubt go down in the halls of history: when Baby and Captain Spaulding start chanting “Tutti fuckin' Frutti!” over and over again. Don't believe me? Just look:

Baskin Robbins: Perfect for an after-murder snack.

We also get scenes of Sheriff Wydell, the deranged maniac cop whose brother was killed by the Firefly family in the first movie. Given this clear conflict of interest, it makes perfect sense that he'd be the main one leading the case. While he's "interviewing" Mother Firefly, the other cops even hear him talking about his dead brother and hear her talking about killing his brother, and never once do they even suspect that Wydell might not be in the best place mentally to be on this fucking case.

"Nah, he's okay. Hell, just let him take her home and keep her prisoner in his house where nobody is looking. We don't have any legal responsibility here after all."

I guess it's easy to be a cop when your only alternative otherwise was crowd control at a fucking Shania Twain concert on a Thursday night. I mean, I guess that was the only other option for these bungholes.

But I dunno, it might be okay in the end. I mean, it isn't like he's hiring hitmen to go after them or something crazy like that...

Hey, it's Danny Trejo!

Err. Uh. Let's just move on.

The next few scenes are really just the movie going deeper into its hole. We've seen the Devil's Rejects do their thing and we've seen Sheriff Wydell's slow descent into madness. Now I guess we just have to watch that scene where Wydell realizes that all of the Firefly family's names are actually just pseudonyms stolen from old Marx Brothers films. To help him solve this mystery, he calls in a movie critic who I'm pretty sure has had sexual thoughts about his mother. I mean, holy Gods, that fucking mustache.

I'm also just now realizing after all these years that the entire plot about their names being stolen from Marx Brothers movies is completely insane. I mean, do these serial killers really seem like the types to watch Marx Brothers movies religiously? Maybe they should have taken their names from Larry the Cable Guy specials or some shit.

They get into an argument about Elvis Presley, which ends in Wydell threatening to murder the critic if he ever says anything bad about Elvis again. Gee, he sure does care about Elvis Presley's reputation just as much as he cares about catching the psychopaths who killed his brother! I mean he gets mad at them both in the same way. But fuck it, he's still the best man to solve this case! Conflict of interest? No problem! Murderous rage at small things that suggest he might have a meltdown soon? Not even a blip on the radar of concerns!

I mean, he could probably kill a prisoner at this point and still nobody would bat an eye!

It happens. I mean, being the sheriff is a stressful job and shit.

Oh...oh, well, okay then. I guess that was a stupid thing to say. Killing the prisoners is okay so long as you have a good reason. Like, if you just don't like them, or if they say something that annoys you. That's some good old fashion deep fried Southern justice.

The Firefly family, meanwhile, is busy meeting up with two other Rob Zombie trademarks: a Ken Foree cameo who runs a brothel. Yes! Good job. Everyone in the world is either a murderer or a prostitute. There are no other options. Rob Zombie, you truly are a humanitarian.

Otis, Baby and Spaulding start having a pretty good time, and we get some scenes of them partying. However, it turns out Ken Foree's character was actually just a dick the whole time who sold them out to Wydell and his hitmen goons. In this movie about murderers, rapists and corpsefuckers, I'm just shocked one of them was a big ol' Judas. Shocked!

This short scene reminds me of how good parts of this can be underneath all the filth and violence. It's a genuinely dramatic scene and a real tense moment where Haig shows so much in that look without even saying a word.

So they get taken back to their old house and tortured for a while. One of the best parts of this sequence is when they're trying to take the blame for one another and save each other from Wydell. Like there's one bit where Wydell asks who killed one of the dead cheerleaders found in their house, and they all shout at him that they individually did it, to keep the others from further punishment. That's...the most oddly sweet defense of violent rape and murder I've ever seen. And yes, I too am amazed I just wrote that.

We also get a scene where Wydell chases Baby through the dark like a hunter...you know, like in a normal slasher movie, this scene would be the killer chasing the normal, straight-man character. But here it's the other way.

And you sorta feel sorry for Wydell too - when he shouts at her about "how do you feel being helpless and tortured?" he does have a point.

Personally I think this is a pretty normal occurrence. I mean, he's just trying to do his job. What's a little murder and cold drunken vengeance if he gets the job done, after all and catches the bad guys? That's what our tax dollars are going toward, after all.

Then Tiny, the misshapen freak giant of the family who I forgot to mention throughout the rest of this because he wasn't in it (which should be his acronym-name frankly), kills Wydell and helps them all escape. There are also some pictures of them just having fun and being happy from the past, and I think it's good that they have this great collection of home movies. I wonder how that's organized..."oh, here's the tape of us torturing that hitchhiker! And then there's one of Baby's 18th birthday party where we went to Red Lobster!"

...nope, just as pants-shittingly scary as when they were actually killing people.

The last scene is our three vile murderers riding off into a bright sunny day, “Free Bird” playing while the cops shoot the shit out of them and kill them. Which is exactly what Lynyrd Skynyrd had in mind when they recorded that song. It's perfect musical synchronicity.

So that's The Devil's Rejects. It's got zero moral character or bright spots to it. It's just a dark, fucked up trip with lots of gore and violence. I mean, fuck it, right? It's offensive to good taste and completely morbid and pitch black, and that's why it's a hoot to watch. Obviously those things don't work without a certain kind of nuance to the writing, but the movie makes it work with some dark comedic timing and some very wryly funny moments, as well as some of the scariest scenes in modern horror anywhere. They even fit in a few dramatic moments here and there. It's tasteless as fuck and some people just won't like it, but what movie is so bland that anyone could like it? The phrase "anyone can like it" usually isn't much of a compliment when you think about it.

The difference between this and the very average House of 1,000 Corpses, or the awful Halloween remakes, is that here, Zombie finally hit the sweet spot he wanted to. He humanizes these characters. No, they're still not quite likable in a traditional way – they do too many horrible things to really call them the protagonists, but I don't really think this is the type of story that needs a protagonist. It's a bunch of awful, evil, vile killers meeting their match and getting a bit of what they dished out for years at the hand of another vengeful psychopath. It's a pretty cool deconstruction of the usual slasher movie tropes.

Even taking that away though, this is probably one of the most realistic serial killer movies ever made that wasn't based on a real life story. While, yes, this is rather sensationalistic in the amount of crimes the Firefly family has committed without being caught, and yes, they are a bit too powerful – it's not just like they're bogeymen like in a Friday the 13th movie. They do horrible things but they also interact with one another like normal human beings at other times (albeit extremely profanity-laden normal human beings), and they have a certain underlying sense of community with one another. It's funny and a bit poignant, and pushes your buttons because then you remember the heinous things these characters did in the first act of the movie.

I don't really know if Zombie intended that, though. I mean, have you seen his other movies? I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't mean to do any of that and was really just kinda fucking with the audience. So was this an unholy accident of a film; fated to be more than its creator ever intended it to be? Fuck it, I dunno. Just go watch the Tutti fuckin' Frutti scene again.

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