12/29/05

The Devil's Rejects

Finally caught up with Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, and it's surprisingly a lot better than I would expect it to be--which isn't saying all that much. Unlike his previous film, which looks like it was pureed, this one actually seems to transform that footage-in-a-blender into a distinctively disorienting style that actually adds to the tension, not fritter it away through sheer pointlessness. Also helps that he's doing homages along the way of telling a fairly original story, not stealing entire sequences from his favorite redneck gothic (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in particular).

That said, it's not exactly a good picture, much less an unsettling one; too many complications, too much fuss. I'm thinking of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, where a pair of youths torment a family at home, and does so with far less fuss and bother.

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