The great thing about Rob Zombie's 2003 directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, was how effective it was in its simplicity. Zombie took his love of low-budget, 1970s horror films and channeled it into a gore-fest that followed the oldest plot in the horror book: A group of attractive young people get lost on a back road somewhere and stumble into a haven for homicidal weirdos. Much killing ensues. Corpses had no character development and no extraneous plot threads, and achieved a sort of strange poetry in its long, dialogue-free stretch at the end as the lone survivor attempted to elude the killers.
The problem with Zombie's Corpses sequel, The Devil's Rejects (which had its local screening at this year's CineVegas Film Festival), is that he's needlessly overburdened it with plot and stabs at creating a backstory for his characters, and all that maneuvering leaves less time for violence and destroys the simplicity of the original concept. Instead of sending a new batch of naïve, nubile young things to the slaughter at the hands of his homicidal family, Zombie puts the family, including clown-faced dad, Capt. Spaulding (Sid Haig); hottie daughter, Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife) and angry son, Otis (Bill Moseley); on the run from the cops who've raided their compound and captured the family matriarch (Leslie Easterbrook, replacing Karen Black).
This means we get a lot of dialogue among the three family members, and not a lot of killing. There is a long sequence in the middle that finds the family holding a traveling band of country musicians hostage in a motel, but mostly the movie is about a single-minded sheriff (William Forsythe) and his pursuit of the family. Zombie still knows exactly how to make his movie look like one of the '70s exploitation classics, with liberal doses of freeze frames, wipes and mustaches, plus one hell of a kickin' '70s soundtrack.
But the kaleidoscopic fun-house atmosphere of Corpses is gone, replaced by a more gritty, less inventive approach. Although Zombie is still a master of gore and manages to stage a couple of suitably nasty set pieces, after two movies he's clearly gotten all he's going to get out of the '70s pastiche shtick.