The Devil's Rejects (1/2)

I watched some of "The Devil's Rejects" last night, before falling asleep (yeah, it put me to sleep). Rob Zombie is an acknowledged fan of Horror, but watching that movie (or what I did of it), I knew that being a fan of Horror and being able to actually write and/or direct a horror movie is a very different thing.

What I saw of it was mean-spirited and icky -- there's clearly money behind it, because it doesn't look cheap, but there's just something terribly foul (and dirt-cheap) in this movie -- good horror confronts the viewer with the sublime, and there's simply nothing sublime in this movie. There is misogyny, cruelty, foulness, barbarity -- and there is a sense of editorial approval on the part of Zombie for the villains (they're too repugnant to even be considered "antiheroes"). It's weird to imagine the raw cynicism at work in the filming of this movie, like the aesthetics of pretend depravity -- "Oh, I was Naked Girl Corpse Number 1 in "The Devil's Rejects"). And there's precious little humor in it -- it appears to take itself very seriously, and that misses out on a vital element of horror: HUMOR. Even black humor is humorous, and this movie piles on the carnage without a lick of humor in it (it reminds me a bit of oh-so-serious Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" -- which also took itself incredibly seriously as it bludgeoned the audience into submission, while pretending to be offering some kind of cogent social commentary). The victims of the "Rejects" aren't deserving targets -- they are unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time. Horrific, sure, but Horror? No. The character of Captain Spaulding brings only the barest whiff of humor to the story, and even that is just a tiny whiff that gets overshadowed in the bloodbath.

My intuitive sense of Zombie in this movie is someone with the means to indulge his enthusiasm for the genre, without having the narrative, intellectual, or aesthetic chops to really pull it off. Now, I haven't seen the rest of the movie, but what I saw of it was fucking dreadful -- horrible people doing horrible things to people -- that kind of inverted ethic where fans of this are supposed to identify (?) with the killers at the expense of the victims (?) -- not sure where he was taking it, whether the trip is worth taking, and so on.

I enjoy Horror, but to me, this wasn't really Horror -- it's the same reason I avoid so-called "Splatterpunk" and "Torture Porn" and the whole "Saw" franchise. Popping people into the meatgrinder isn't Horror in my view, although it is surely horrific. Maybe my intrinsic sense of righteousness demands that the evil be punished, and the lead characters in this movie most definitely need to be napalmed -- and I'm not entirely sure that this'll even happen.

Movies like "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" are, while not marketed as such, most definitely Horror movies (and horrific) -- they call forth a monstrous dread in the viewer, invoke Terror and Horror in graphic ways -- but there is enough character weight in these harrowing movies to carry the audience through. Since the killers are the nominal protagonists of this movie, there is nobody to identify with (except for sympathy for the victims and the actors starring in this movie). It's very dehumanizing.

Horror, for all of its reputation, is not a dehumanizing genre -- it actually places a huge and high value on humanity, and approaches issues of what makes us human by exploring the horrors of Man and Nature. None of that is evident in this movie.

(I'll comment on the rest of it after I've watched it, which I'm only doing out of a sense of narrative closure -- judging from the front end of it, I think I know what's coming on the back end)