Thoughts on The Devil's Rejects inspired by Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes

Watching the The Hills Have Eyes has helped my clarify some of my thinking on The Devil's Rejects - I'm sure all of my readers have been anxiously waiting for this to happen!

I had a hard time talking about The Devil's Rejects because while I thought it was impressive for what it was, I also thought that "what it was" was pretty repulsive. Looking at it through the lens of The Hills Have Eyes helped.

In The Hills Have Eyes, the nice, normal, American family is attacked and brutalized by a group of outlaw, mutant cannibals. What's interesting from a po-mo 21st Century perspective is that the American family isn't mocked. Craven doesn't idealize them, either, but the movie is definitely on their side. They are the victims of a monstrous assault and even though they are, in a way, "trespassing" on the mutants territory (though it's more like they stumbled onto their hunting ground), the movie's source of terror is their realization that they are outside the protection of civilization, that they are dealing with true outlaws, and that their only hope is to respond in kind.

Note: as the final shot of the movie makes clear, this is not, like, perhaps, Straw Dogs or Dirty Harry, a movie about how, when all is said and done, a man has to be a man and get his hands dirty because the law has its limits. Rather, the close up of Martin Speer's face in a murderous rage suggests that vengeance/feuding outside of the law leads to a downward spiral into sub-humanism for everyone involved (see also the ending of The Descent).

Now, The Devil's Rejects is like The Hills Have Eyes, except told from the POV of the mutants and, to a certain extent, idealizing their outlaw ethos. Zombie doesn't aestheticize their violent actions, like Peckinpah does in The Wild Bunch: he keeps everything completely unpleasant. At the same time, despite the horrible things they do, they're obviously the movie's heroes: we're meant to root for them to escape the forces of law and order, who are presented as bigger monsters than the outlaws. They're also presented as hypocrites, which, by the movie's values is a lot worse than being a monster.

As a filmmaker, Zombie's major asset is that he's willing to go all the way - he doesn't flinch. This may be a good sensibility for a horror movie director, but, as I've said before, I don't think its enough. Rejects is more assured in terms of tone than House of 100 Corpses, but it seems to achieve that assurance by narrowing its range. It's a more coherent movie than its predecessor, a more completely realized "vision", but, in many ways, it has even less to offer to this horror fan. There's no order here - nothing to measure any fall against, nothing to terrorize.

The Devil's Rejects is one of those movies that is trying so hard to be outrageous - it's so obviously pushing buttons - that I can't help but feel that actually getting outraged about it is kind of pointless. It isn't trying to hide its nihilism, for example, or pass itself off as something it isn't.

Though there's a certain purity to what Rob Zombie does in the movie that I (perhaps against my better judgment) can't help but admire, I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with a movie that is such a fully-realized valentine to violent, nihilistic outlaws. Not necessarily "wrong" in the "I don't think it should ever have been made"-way, but definitely "wrong" in the "I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone actually ever see the movie and I'd even be willing to engage in endless debate with its supporters on the internet"-way.

For what it's worth, I'm interested in seeing what Zombie will do with his Halloween remake.

One More Thing About The Hills Have Eyes

I'm a dog enthusiast and one of the things I like to go on and on about is the idea (best expressed, IMO, in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn - alas, I missed the first part of this NATURE program) that being able to domesticate dogs was a huge evolutionary advantage for human beings. And who knew that The Hills Have Eyes illustrates this: the mutants eat dogs - they see them only as a food source, an attitude which comes back to bite them. Even though the mutants have the edge on the Carters in terms of home field advantage and savagery (their general willingness to use violence), the Carter's dog evens things out a bit.

Interesting: most of the memorable "horror movie dogs" are there (a) as victims (John Carpenter's The Thing) or (b) as symbols of man's barely domesticated bestial nature (see Tenebre or The Beyond), but here, one of the dogs at least, gets to play hero.

Movie Chat: The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes

I tried to watch The Last House on the Left years ago and couldn't get through it. Not because of its unpleasantness or my squeamishness, but because of the bad acting. So I had always avoided The Hills Have Eyes, fearing that it would be more of the same. But I ended up wanting to watch it for some research I'm doing and I was (un)pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.

It's definitely a "horror" movie, but watching it, I couldn't help thinking about how different it is from most other horror movies - especially current ones. There's some gore and general gruesomeness, but Wes Craven doesn't really focus on it (a la Seven) or fetishize it (a la The House of 1000 Corpses). His take on it seems much more matter-of-fact: it's upfront about the effects of violence, without reveling in them.

And though the movie has its share of suspense sequences (will the mutants attack? will the guy with the gun get back in time to use it?), creating suspense seems less important to Craven then ratcheting up the tension. It feels a little bit like a post-apocalyptic survival movie - Panic in Year Zero!, say - where the question isn't so much "What horrible thing will happen to these people?" and more "Given that they're facing this horrible thing, what will they be driven to do? To what lengths will they go to get themselves out of trouble?" (Hey, that also turns out to be one of the central questions of The Descent!)

More importantly, Craven doesn't make too much use of shock/scare/boo! moments, which may be the biggest difference between this movie and the current horror crop. What's shocking and horrific about The Hills Have Eyes is the situation itself: the brutal attack on the family that Craven refuses to make easy on us, by , say, sparing the likable characters or leaving out the survivors' grief.

Also notable: the "monsters" in this movie aren't really superhuman. This makes the movie feel a bit more like Straw Dogs, Deliverance, or Southern Comfort, rather than most slasher/zombie/monster flicks. But the knowledge that the stranded family members could sruvive (if they get their act together, self-defense-wise) makes things, in some way, much more horrible than if they were facing an unstoppable creature. I can only assume that The Last House on the Left works somewhat the same way and now I'm interested in giving it another chance. I'm also interested in checking out the remake of this movie, if only to confirm my suspicions that it's full of gore-for-its-own-sake, "boo"-scares, and other current horror cliches*.

One last thing: seeing a "real" grindhouse movie like this one makes me even less impressed with Planet Terror (I still like Death Proof, though). The Hills Have Eyes is an example of great B-movie filmmaking: Craven gets everything he can out of a fairly simple set up, without any needless excess. And, I'm not sure exactly how to put this, but the attention to the specifics of how the events unfold during the central R.V.-invasion sequence is pretty impressive. It shows a canniness and intelligence that is lacking from a lot of contemporary horror productions, which get by on big gestures rather than on smart details.

*Although, per this Sean Collins post, it probably isn't really a good idea to judge a movie before seeing it. FWIW, I think Hostel is all-over-the-place, though it has its moments.