"i'm excited to see another rob zombie movie!"

Hello internet. Have I told you how awesome Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" is? Because it's really goddamn awesome. For me, it might be the finest achievement in American cinema this year, Brokeback Mountain's untintentionally hilarious saga of gay cowboys eating pudding notwithstanding.

I don't know about you, but when I think Rob Zombie, I do not think quality. I think about being subjected to repeated blasts of "More Human than Human" in friends' cars and apartments and the whole Son of Svengoolie except darker vibe never jibed with me. And then he made that movie about the 1000 corpses and it just reminded me of House of the Dead, which seemed like the epitome of bad, lazy horror.

So why did I rent The Devil's Rejects? Because Roger Ebert gave it a thumb up. So did his mewling co-pilot, but Ebert tends to stil be a reliable barometer in the world of horror films. Plus, I'd heard 1000 Corpses wasn't an awful movie, just not great. But from the moment the movie starts, with the manson family of the film strapping on big metal masks to start a gunfight with William Forsythe's siege of Texas troopers, I was overwhelmed at the fact that this movie was not a piece of shit like I was expecting.

It's an hour of maximum gore, the best truck splattering scene I've ever seen in a movie, Brian Posehn getting shot in the head while his friend behind him pukes across his naked girlfriend freshly dragged out of the shower by the Reject who strongly resembles Charles Manson, clowns, P.J. Soles, stigmata and burn victims. It looks to emulate films like The Candy Snatchers in content and look, as well as moral ambiguity and succeeds for me, because it makes Candy Snatchers watchable by combining it with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Empire Magazine's blurb for this movie reads: "It’s uncomfortably the work of someone who thinks mass murder is cool and has no feeling for regular humans. " Which, of course, is overstating things greatly, but that's also chiefly the appeal. Imagine if Squeaky and Tex and the gang were allowed to make a movie about their time of free-livin' and misbehavin'. Also, the music is really great, all the more because Rob Zombie had full control and could have thrown together another "Dragula" to slap on a gunfight, but he sticks strictly within the 1978 setting and makes really good choices, right down to the final scenes all scored to the finest usage of "Freebird" since it made Bill Hicks scream about how Hitler was an underachiever.