I tried to watch Rob Zombie's newest movie on DVD 'The Devils Rejects' I couldn't make it all the way through and I can only say that about three movies I have seen in my lifetime.

But this was by far the worst.

Hell, I even sat through 'From Dusk Till Dawn', 'Event Horizon', 'AVP' and most of 'Kill Bill Vol 1'. I even sat through all of 'Freddy Got Fingered' which held the former title of "worst movie ever made", but I couldn't stand more than half an hour of this shit.

Don't misunderstand, I enjoy ridiculously, ultra-violent films, but something was missing from The Devils Rejects, which made it the worst of the worst. After about 20 minutes of intense detailed instruction that women are only for being tortured, then screwed, then killed for no reason, (or sometimes tortured, then killed, then screwed for no reason) I simply had to shut it off. I went to IMDB.com to check user opinions and guess what? I'm the only one on the fucking planet who does not like it, and everyone else thinks Rob Zombie is a Gorram genius.

Remember those *trick* questions on the final exam, like, 'What color was George Washington's white horse?' or 'What year was The Battle of 1812?' The Devil's Rejects is a trick movie.

The movie was a test, people. A test for you to recognize crap and call it. If you failed to walk out of the theatre, you failed the test. If you failed to eject the disk before the movie was over and say, 'Hey, this is dogshit!' then I'm sorry but you failed. If you saw the movie and think it was even *ratable* on a scale of one to ten, then you failed, but don't feel too bad. A very very high percentage of people failed as well, so at least you have some company. I guess that fact was more disappointing to me than the movie its self.

Later the same day, I watched Eternal, an independent Canadian movie about the Countess Elizabeth Bathory in modern times, and her lust for young female blood. The woman is downright Evil, and has near-intercourse with her victims before taking their lives. Lots of Lots of LOTS of female/female eroticism, and shot on nice locations in Quebec and Venice. The plot is nearly awful, and the acting almost as bad as the production.

So I had to ask myself why Eternal was a stinker, but The Devils Rejects was a non-movie.

What was missing was motive. What was missing from the horrible but not horrifying hillbilly hicks in The Devils Rejects was any intelligent design (sorry, I had to do that) any real sense of motivation. Without it, the characters actions have no basis, and we, the audience, cannot judge them, or relate to them, or care about them one way or another. Perhaps an example would help:

Conrad - Hey Reid, why the hell does your dog keep trying to hump my leg?
Reid- I dunno. That's just what he does.
Conrad - Well its completely ungrounded, and without any discernible motivation. Not to mention it's stupid. So tell him to knock it off before I kick him in the balls.

(Alright, it is a poor example, although I suspect watching Reid's dog hump someone's leg would be more interesting to watch than The Devils Rejects.)

Meanwhile, in Eternal, the countess has a motivation (there are some who would call this motivation part of the PLOT) and once we understand why the countess does what she does, we can relate, and judge her and her motivations because of it. In other words, it gives us a reason to react to the film. Can there even be a plot without motivation? Bittorrent the Devils Rejects and find out.

Blog on,
-CZ

Labels: Hollywood, movie reviews, Ubersuck