Welcome to the very exact midpoint of this year’s Rob Zombie Spookshow here at B-Movie Enema.

In 2003, after a couple of years of trying to find a distributor or studio willing to take a chance on his grindhouse throwback, Rob Zombie introduced a terrifyingly raw and visceral form of horror that, maybe ahead of its time, really put audiences through more of a horrifying experience than a form of entertainment. This was his debut movie, House of 1000 Corpses. It really played like the nightmarish and realistic grit that was seen in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At times, it felt like you were watching something you weren’t supposed to see. It was equal parts a movie narrative and a window inside a scattered and deranged mind.

What made the movie terrifying were the members of the Firefly family. Specifically, Otis, played by Bill Moseley, himself a veteran of the TCM franchise, Baby, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, and friend and accomplice to the family, Captain Spaulding, a deranged clown played by Sid Haig. They were violent. They were antisocial. In the case of Captain Spaulding, he was charismatic. In the case of Baby, she was sexy – a honeypot waiting to reveal a psychotic who liked to play with her prey.

While working on House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie would have what he called a “vague” idea for a story that featured the brother of a sheriff the Fireflies killed coming back for revenge on the family. This revenge plot leads him on a manhunt for the three most interesting characters to complete his revenge. Thus was born what is undoubtedly Zombie’s masterpiece, The Devil’s Rejects.

I think what surprised folks the most about this movie is that it does something that not many did during the 80s and 90s. Most of the time, you have a horror movie that features a pretty thin killer. The killer is a monster, or a scarred person looking for revenge, or, worse, mentally handicapped and, therefore, deranged. Thrillers feature an unwell psychopathic woman who needs to calm down and stop obsessing over a man, or a man who is just a sociopath and a rapist, or whatever.

However, Baby, Otis, and Captain Spaulding all have something different. Are they deranged? Yes. Are they psychopaths? Absolutely. They also have some surprising character traits. They are more than just what they do. There are personalities. There are histories together. They may be killers and misanthropes, but they do care for one another. They also have excellent chemistry together.

There is an undeniable watchability to their crimes, no matter how vile or gruesome. Obviously, this is subject matter that will not be for everyone, and admittedly, elements of this movie are difficult for anyone to watch. Yet… The audience is taken along with this trio through their escapades. We’re almost held captive by them and forced to continue to see them slice their way through Texas. Surprisingly, we are stuck with them, we fear them, we don’t know what they will do next, but we start to understand them. We start to want to see what happens next.

So, let’s get in the car with three mass murderers and see what it is they will do while trying to escape justice.

The movie pretty much picks right up from the end of House of 1,000 Corpses. House ended with all four youngsters the Firefly family captured being killed, along with a Sheriff, his Deputy, and the father of one of the girls murdered. Enough evidence was recovered or known for what is known as a “search and destroy” mission from a giant law enforcement posse to be dispatched to the farmhouse where the Fireflys live. The raid kills one family member, Rufus, and the posse captures Mother Firefly. Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Otis (Bill Moseley) manage to escape death and/or capture. Uncovered on the Firefly property are the remains of over 75 missing people.

The posse is led by Sheriff John Quincey Wydell, played by William Forsythe. Wydell has a particular hatred for the family. The sheriff killed in the previous film is Wydell’s brother, George. So he sees this as something of a holy vengeance that needs to be called down on this group of killers.

Baby and Otis manage to escape. They hijack a car and kill the driver. They hole up in a scuzzy, run-down motel called the Khaki Palms. As the police scour the evidence littered about the Firefly farmhouse, they discover pictures of some of the bodies along with Captain Spaulding, a figure Wydell knows. It doesn’t hurt that Spaulding stars in TV commercials for his roadside freakshow attraction.

Baby and Otis go to Khaki Pines because that has always been the planned hideaway, as planned by Captain Spaulding. One thing that wasn’t ever really revealed in the original film is that Spaulding is Baby’s father. It sheds some light on what the Firefly family actually is. Mother is the central figure in the farmhouse and seemingly Baby’s mother (she even mentions things she always told Baby when she was younger before the shootout with the posse). Whether or not Spaulding is the father of Rufus and Tiny, the deformed, hulking beast of a person often seen doing manual labor around the farm, is not very clear. What is clear, though, is that Otis is not a blood relative of the others in any way. He was “adopted.” He’s maybe the least playfully kooky and insane like Baby, Spaulding, and Mother. He’s a true-blue believer that he was placed on this Earth to murder in the name of Satan, thus his nickname of the “Son of Satan.” Basically, Baby is cruel, but playful. Otis is cruel and intentional. He’s less crazy, rather, seeing no value in human life outside his own.

Meanwhile, we meet Charlie (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead). He runs a whorehouse. Captain Spaulding’s intent is to use the whorehouse as a hideout. Charlie is not exactly a fan of this idea, as he knows Spaulding wouldn’t need a place if there wasn’t heat on him.

At the motel, Otis and Baby arrive ahead of Captain Spaulding. Instead, they find a touring country band and their roadie (the band is headed up by Geoffrey Lewis and Lew Temple, with their wives played by Priscilla Barnes and Kate Norby, and Brian Posehn as Jimmy the roadie. This is where the depravity and the really interesting elements of this movie start to really pick up in The Devil’s Rejects. Even if a member of the audience had not seen the previous film, We’ve spent the first 30 minutes of this movie knowing that Otis and Baby are a very dangerous duo. If we hadn’t seen the previous movie, we’re about to see exactly how fucked up these two are.

Meanwhile, the band, known as Banjo and Sullivan, are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had no intentional reason to cross paths with Baby and Otis. Baby, much like she did in House of 1,000 Corpses, uses her looks and her flirtatious ability to lull Roy Sullivan (Lewis) into a honey pot. And maybe the better comparison is a spider web because the gnarly, hairy spider, Otis, is waiting to make his move too.

This is an extremely effective sequence in the movie. It’s well written, acted, and edited. We spent a couple of minutes getting an idea of who the people are as part of this touring band. The band is two couples and a young guy they picked up as a roadie because he needed work, and he could do the work they needed. The Banjo half is the younger couple. They have a youthful love in the way they adore each other. You get the impression that Adam Banjo (Temple) is the one out of all these characters who will have an actual shot at superstardom. That’s because Roy and his wife are older, and Roy is hanging on to past glory. He repeats that he once shook hands with Johnny Cash, someone he also said he once sang with, indicating their meeting was simply a passing moment that one will remember forever, and the other hardly noticed it happened at all.

These little details are important to build the tension of this chance interaction with a pair of deranged killers. What this sequence is doing is not something you realize is playing out the way it is at first. You think, “Oh, these are some colorful characters that will serve as some fodder for the buzzsaws that are Otis and Baby.” But when you think back to where this goes, how it plays out, and what little you gathered about the victims, it helps you to piece together a horrific moment. These are people who were just living their lives in some small way. Anything they did on stage will not compare to the fame of being Firefly victims. None of their songs will be as memorable as the conditions Otis and Baby left them in after they were murdered.

So, yes, Baby lures Roy into dropping his guard so that she and Otis can spring a trap that leads to them being able to hijack and hide in the band’s motel room. That way, they have the band confined in a space they can control, and they were not seen checking into the motel. Otis pulls a naked Wendy Banjo out of the shower to keep an eye on all of them. Jimmy, the roadie, knocks on the door. When he’s brought into the room, Otis shoots him through the head.

Elsewhere, Captain Spaulding runs out of gas and needs to get a new ride to meet with Otis and Baby and go to Charlie’s. He discovers a mother and son at a general store. After just seeing what Otis and Baby are capable of, this is another scene with a similar tension concerning a psychopath, but with a clear delineation between what Otis and Baby are compared to what Captain Spaulding is. Spaulding first says he needs to take the car for “top secret clown business.” The woman says no, he escalates by asking her if he stuttered and calling her a bitch. He then gets physical with her, making you believe he is going to kill this kid’s mom in front of his eyes. He doesn’t which then makes you worry that he’s going to hurt the kid. He doesn’t. He simply asks the kid about not liking clowns. He only leaves the kid with a warning that he will check back in with him, and if he doesn’t have a reason for hating clowns, he’ll kill his whole family.

Back at the motel, the psychological torture begins. Baby dances playfully in front of Roy. Otis asks him why he isn’t getting any ideas about his sister dancing like she is in front of him. Roy says he’s a married man, so Otis wants to see what it is that’s so special about his wife, and tells Gloria (Barnes) to strip for him. He then rubs his gun across her various erogenous bits, ultimately raping her with the gun and forcing her to kiss him. It’s part humiliation and dominance that Otis wants to exert over this group. Killing Jimmy was only to show how serious he is. Otis then takes both Adam and Roy for some errands, leaving the wives with Baby.

Zombie is smart to step away from the motel. The first time was for Captain Spaulding to get a new car. While that was a potentially tense scene, it’s not the same level as the stuff Otis and Baby are doing. He cuts away a second time to show Wydell interrogating Mother Firefly. The interrogation starts calmly. He just wants Mother Firefly to tell him where Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding are. He just wants to take them down as quick as possible so they don’t die like mangy dogs in the street in a shootout. When she brings up his brother, he starts slapping her around and throttling her.

We return to Otis, Roy, and Adam. He makes them drive out to a part of the open desert where Otis has buried weapons in case of emergency. Once Otis reveals that when they dig up the weapons, that’s the end of the road for them. Adam and Roy decide to try to jump Otis. However, Otis overpowers both of them. He ends up beating Roy to death with a tree branch after shooting and wounding Adam. Otis cuts Adam’s face off for attempting to fight back against Otis and trying to be a hero. Otis tells them that he is the Devil and he’s there to do the Devil’s work.

In the motel room, Baby keeps up with the domination, humiliation, and her generally bratty behavior. When Wendy wants to go to the bathroom, she won’t let her until she slaps Gloria like she means it. She then wants Wendy to kiss her and tell her she’s having a good time. Wendy tries escaping through the bathroom window or call for help. Gloria takes a gun from the distracted Baby, but Baby is quick to throw a hunting knife into her chest to kill her before she can shoot.

Wendy comes out of the bathroom and sees what happened to Gloria and escapes through the door of the motel room. Gloria runs right into Captain Spaulding. Baby tells him to grab her, and he headbutts Gloria to knock her out. They bring Gloria back to the room and wait for Otis to return. When Otis returns (wearing Adam’s face like a mask), the trio, now dubbed as part of “the Devil’s Rejects,” decide it’s time to hit the fuckin’ road. They decide to leave Gloria for the maid to find the next morning. The maid finds the ghastly scene of the murders. In the bathroom, the words “The Devil’s Rejects” are scrawled on the walls with blood. A traumatized Gloria, still wearing her husband’s face as a mask flails about and runs off in a manic state. She runs out into the road and is killed by a semi truck.

I mentioned earlier that I thought it was an excellent moviemaking decision by Zombie to weave back and forth from the horror scene in the motel, to a scene with Captain Spaulding that, while also kind of scary and violent, made you chuckle a bit from Sid Haig’s excellent line delivery, back to the horror at the motel, to the cops, and so on and so forth. The reason why I feel that way is important to the final 45 minutes of this movie. In order for this movie to work, Zombie needed to invert the expectations of the protagonist and the antagonist.

What do I mean by that? Well, typically, the word protagonist is taken by those who see or hear it to mean the hero, the good guy, etc. While the antagonist of the plot is typically the villaiin. More often than not, that is true, and that’s the case for the vast majority of movies. However, the side of good and evil is actually part of neither word’s definition. A protagonist does not have to be a good guy. It only has to be the character who progresses the plot. They are usually the main characters we follow as an audience. The antagonist is the character who stands in the way of the goals of the characters we are following.

So, in The Devil’s Rejects, we are with the bad guys. Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding are progressing the plot while Sheriff Wydell is there to ultimately attempt to stand in their way. While doing the inversion of who is the antagonist, Zombie has also crafted characters who are more than just crazed killers. These aren’t the typical mass murderers seen in horror films. This isn’t Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, who do a lot of killing, but we never really learn much about them except for very basic motivations. If we were to have it so that the entire scene with Otis and Baby humiliating and torturing Banjo and Sullivan was one gigantic uncut portion of the movie, viewers are going to rebel against the movie – if they hadn’t already based on language or the brutality of the movie up to that point anyway. We need to understand that Sheriff Wydell is not exactly any better of a person on a psychological level than the Devil’s Rejects. We need to have a reprieve to see that Captain Spaulding does have some set of morals. He won’t kill a kid’s mom in front of the kid. He won’t hurt the kid. Will he scare the kid? Oh fuck yeah, he will, but that’s not his brand of craveness or psychosis.

We need that to offset the bratty Baby and the nihilistic Otis, both of whom are willing either to dance around as the world burns or be the one who sets the world on fire from their rage. The movie does a good job of giving these characters depth. That’s not to say we are supposed to sympathize or empathize with these killers, but we should be able to see some sort of method to their madness OR be able to understand what their presence in any scene means. That also goes for Sheriff Wydell, because we’ll see soon that he has his own set of bad scruples.

This isn’t a movie that is causing you to side with any of these bad characters. It’s a movie without a good guy, but people you understand through their actions, their motivations, etc. It’s what makes this movie interesting in comparison to House of 1,000 Corpses. In that movie, we’re seeing the depravity of the Firefly family from start to finish. It’s a style of movie that was present in the 70s, something that Zombie was emulating in both that film and in this one. That movie has more of a feel akin to Blood Sucking Freaks. There’s a hopelessness to it; the nihilism that Otis embodies. This movie has more of a sense that there is someone trying to stop the psychos but they are willing to become psychotic themselves to do it. It’s a different feel. There are more places to go with that.

Wydell brings in a couple of bounty hunters who have some connections. He gives him a list of names he wants the duo, called the “unholy two,” to track down. With them on the hunt, Wydell returns to the Firefly farm. There, he encounters his brother’s spirit. The spirit of George Wydell tells his younger brother that he can’t pass on until this is resolved. While it turns out to be a dream, it only drives Sheriff Wydell crazier to get the fugitives. After the unholy two calls Wydell about tracking down a potential contact of Spaulding’s named Charlie Altamont, he visits Mother Firefly in her holding cell and stabs her to death.

Spaulding, Otis, and Baby arrive at Charlie’s. They party together with drink and coke and Charlie’s whores. Meanwhile, Wydell’s psyche is deteriorating as he prepares his big speech when he catches up with Spaulding in particular. He calls himself the Lord’s righteous arm of justice. I’m pretty sure that is something only a crazy person would say.

Wydell tracks down Charlie and tells him that he wants the Fireflys to be counted as present that night. Charlie asks what if they aren’t present at his whorehouse at midnight tonight as requested. Wydell makes no bones that he’s willing to kill Charlie for not doing what he says. Wydell sends the unholy two in to capture the Fireflys, but not to kill them. That’s something Wydell specifically wants the pleasure of witnessing.

They sneak in, kill Charlie’s best whores, and take advantage of the fugitives’ inebriated state to capture Baby and Otis while Wydell captures Spaulding himself. Spaulding says that if he’s going to start killing them, they need to start with him and make sure he’s all the way dead, or he’s going to come back for him and get his revenge on Wydell. I never really thought about it before, but this is kind of like The Empire Strikes Back. Charlie is Lando and he got pressured into handing over the Rebels to the state (Empire) for torture and interrogation. Huh… Star Wars was referenced earlier in the movie when his best girl was suggesting getting into some sci-fi roleplay for the patrons. Now it had that whole Lando betrayal.

I see you, Rob Zombie.

Wydell brings the Devil’s Rejects back to the Firefly farm to make them pay for their sins. He holds up pictures of their victims and staples them to their bodies based on who killed which one. He then uses a cattle prod to shock them. He shows Baby a picture of one of his victims – Mother.

His next act of torture is to literally nail Otis to the armrests of his chair. Wydell frees Baby to allow her to run so he can hunt her. He pours gasoline in the room and lights it on fire with Otis and Spaulding still tied to their chairs. He then chases Baby with an axe. She runs to a shed to find tools to protect herself. There, Charlie reveals that he’s there to save them. He takes Baby to his car to wait while he goes into the house to get the others. Unfortunately, he gets Scatman’d by Wydell and is axed in the chest.

Wydell then shoots Baby in the calf to slow her down. He then whips her with a strap of leather. He tries strangling Baby to death, but, well, there’s a member of the family that Wydell did not account for. Tiny sneaks up behind Wydell and saves his sister. He snaps Wydell’s neck. Baby tells him that Otis and Spaulding are inside the house. He frees them and they get away.

Tiny puts the trio into Charlie’s car to drive off. Otis tells Tiny they will come back for him, but as they drive away, Tiny just walks back into the burning farmhouse, presumably to end his own life now that all his family is either dead or gone. The trio drives for the border, and what they think is their freedom. All of them are still suffering from Wydell’s torture.

As they get closer to that freedom, we see each of the characters in better times when they were still invulnerable. Well, at least invulnerable in whatever way they can be. However, they are caught at a roadblock. Otis wakes the sleeping Spaulding and Baby to make their last stand. They arm themselves and drive for the roadblock with guns blazing. The movie ends as they are all shot multiple times by the police.

This movie’s ending is surprisingly poignant. No, these are not good guys. No, their crimes are not forgiven because “Free Bird” sweetly plays them to their “deaths” (quotations are for the follow-up, 3 From Hell). There was only one ending for them, their deaths. Still, the movie does the near impossible. It makes you care about how this movie ends.

Rob Zombie is not telling you to like these characters. They are cutting a terrible path of murder and horror across Texas. He’s telling a compelling story of psychopaths in a cat-and-mouse game. And therein lies the twist. It would be one thing if Wydell were an all-American good guy saddling up to take down the bandits. He’s not. He’s given in to vengeance. He does very little actual good in this movie. Maybe he did a good thing by kind of soothing the maid after asking her about seeing The Devil’s Rejects at the motel. She’s clearly in shock, and he, at the very least, does not treat her gruffly.

Something else that is kind of interesting is how the characters handle these incredibly terrifying characters. All throughout House of 1,000 Corpses and throughout the first two-thirds of this movie, if you see one of the Fireflys you need to run as far and as fast as you can, or they WILL kill you. Baby is the real focal point too. She’s the “normal” looking one of the group. Otis would have to jump you or attack you quickly. Captain Spaulding looks like a snake oil salesman you simply cannot trust. Baby, though… She’s the honey pot and will draw you in so the others can get you. Still, they are counter to the brighter, sunlit world we think we live in. As Otis says, they are the Devil, and they are there to do the Devil’s work in this world. They work counter to the way we think the world works.

And they don’t fear the law coming down on them because they have an expectation of how the law will work. The law won’t come to kill them first, then ask questions later. The law is supposed to have rules to follow. Rules the Fireflys do not follow. Yet, the moment Wydell twists the rules to his favor and acts independently of how THEY expect him to carry out his role, that fills them with terror, Baby in particular. I could see people say that seeing the Fireflys laid low once they are captured and Baby’s terror is kind of out of character based on what we saw of them for one and two-thirds movies.

But it makes perfect sense to me. Their capture and torture at the hands of Wydell doesn’t make them sympathetic. It shows how they view their role as chaos agents and their expectation of the law being unable to appropriately counter that because of the entrapment of the rules. When Wydell plays by their rules, now they are the victims, a thing they had never been before.

I think that makes The Devil’s Rejects brilliant. This is the movie that made Rob Zombie a real name in horror. It was the first movie to make people notice. It got a positive review from Roger Ebert because it wasn’t just mindless murder. It’s terror. True, realistic terror. While the Fireflys, Otis in particular, are over-the-top, there are people who are just an impulse or two away from becoming them to some degree that would still be horrific. This movie leads to Rob Zombie doing something we’ll be talking about in a couple of weeks, for sure. It refined his ideas of what these characters could be from House of 1,000 Corpses. It’s an excellent film and a terrifying exploitation horror film that should be watched by anyone who can handle a gritty and tough subject.

We keep rolling on here at B-Movie Enema, and our October theme, Rob Zombie’s Spookshow. Next week, I’m gonna review a movie I have not yet seen from Zombie’s filmography. It features all his familiar cast members and is sometimes described as Zombie’s version of The Running Man. Join me as we step ever closer to Halloween with 2016’s 31!

Until then, I think there is some fuckin’ ice cream in my fuckin’ future!