Oh, We Are What We Are When In Danger
Jul. 23rd, 2005 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSo the rest of the week unspooled, as it had to, and I plunged headlong into Fri-/Hell-day with my usual qualms: On the one hand, Nihilist Propaganda Guy (even more sulky than on Wednesday—he sat in the front, deliberately trying to catch my eye, and when I refused to let him he put his sunglasses on for the entire rest of the class); on the other, the apparent sudden but total lack of TVs and VCRs at TFS, a longstanding and cyclical problem…people steal them, far as I can figure. But over the year I was away, they’ve decided the best way to "deal" with this problem is to A) pretend it doesn’t exist and B) therefore not do anything about it, which meant that while I was fine for my first Short Screenplay class, the second one didn’t go as well—and that was the one NPG was in, funnily enough!—because I’d intended to show short films on VHS, and therefore didn’t have any alternative lecture notes with me; I bullshitted for an hour, then told people they should just work on their assignments or go on early break. In Canadian Film History, thank Christ, I did have my notes with me, and was just able to skip to the next class on my roster. But FUCK, man. Just fuck. Way to make the teacher look assinine.
Still, the evening made up for it somewhat, at least from my point of view:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agincourtgirl agreed to stay late, which meant Steve and I were able to meet after school and walk straight up to the Paramount to see The Devil’s Rejects.
I suppose I should preface my review by admitting that I quite enjoyed House of 1,000 Corpses, for all that I admit—nay, trumpet—its many integral faults. But Rejects is as far away from that candy-colored Hallowe’en monster mash as The Wild Bunch is from High Noon: Rob Zombie has used the intervening time to take his 1970s fetish to the next level, enlarging on the tropes he so adores rather than just referencing them for the sake of: "Hey, man, remember this? Cool fuckin’ beans!", and the result is brutal in a truthful, disturbing, genuinely impactful sort of way. Rather than treating the whole affair (rock-drop downer ending, cannibal family values, sexual torture of the innocent, etc.) like some creepily cheesy horror geekboy theme-park ride starring every obscure 1970s actor he’s ever wanted to work with (plus his wife, her annoying helium giggle, and her all-too-often naked ass), this is a straight-to-hell outlaw Death Trip gone horribly, horribly wrong for everybody involved, even the Groucho character-monickered Fireflies themselves; everything’s dirty, nothing’s pretty, people get what they give, in spades. Which, needless to say, pretty much suits me down to—and under—the cold, hard Texas ground.
My main difficulty with House was that it presupposed a particular reality without ever actually proving it—without working for it, the way a good movie oughtta. If you’re going to show me the Fireflies (Mama, Baby, Otis, Rufus, Tiny [and Grampa, who seems to have disappeared between movies one and two—but then again, there’s an actual temporal gap there: Long enough for Otis to grow a beard, at any rate. So maybe the old bastard simply died, and they chucked him down Dr Satan’s rabbit hole]) living a Sawney Bean/Bloody Benders/Manson Family life of aimless rural crime and grue, just far enough off the beaten path to get away with treating serial murder as a J-O-B rather than a hobby, I need some sort of way to understand the why behind the what: These are people who claim to have a philosophy, after all (or, in one case, an Art). Is it habit, pleasure, necessity, a big middle finger in the face of God and man? How is Captain Spaulding, proprietor of the fabled Murder Ride, involved—is he a parasite, an enabler, a blood relative, all three? They’ll obviously kill at the slightest provocation, but are they willing—or afraid—to die? Do they love each other? Can they really expect to get away with this forever?
Well, Rejects takes those challenges and (literally) runs with them. It puts Baby and Otis, the only two to make it out of the House intact when the cops finally come calling, under pressure from scene one and holds them there ‘till scene zero; it also explains a fair deal about Captain Spaulding, a functional sociopath who finds himself yoked by sex, money and one particular child to a passle of dysfunctional psychopaths. Better yet, it drains all the squicky glamour out of things like Baby’s constant mind-games, Otis’ ranting necrophilia, the captive Mama’s pseudo-nympho Whore of Babylon act (this time ‘round it’s ferocious rather than pathetic, born from a bottomless pit of rage, as though she’s daring The Man to do anything to her that she can’t somehow make herself enjoy)—that Spaulding is the only one of them who can be trusted to run an errand without coming home wearing a human skin mask is fairly sad, and Zombie doesn’t shy away from the fact that his main characters need killing in the worst damn way. The only drawback he finds with the person elected to do said killing, the sheriff played by William Forsythe, is that he’s close enough to the line already to catch the Firelies’ madness like a disease halfway through his otherwise righteous crusade to check them out of existence’s cheap desert motel.
In fact, if I wanted to be all meta about it (and I obviously do), I could float the theory that House, with its mainly-Zombie soundtrack, is the Firefly family’s collective dream of themselves as unbeatable, unkillable monsters, always on top, always holding all the cards. Rejects, OTOH, is what they look like from the outside rather than the in-. This explains the complete lack of closure on that whole demented Dr Satan thang (the only loose thread which could possibly be parlayed into a third film, though Zombie swears he wants to avoid one…if the events of Rejects probably only take a week, the ol’ Doc’s gonna be wanting new experimental subjects and perhaps food sometime quite soon; maybe he’s made himself a walker to match his crane-track thingie, or can get that skinless wresler dude to hoist him back up above), plus the lack of Zombie on the soundtrack, which is entirely made up of period-suitable music. Except for the one track credited to Banjo and Sullivan, of course, a "long-lost 1970s bluegrass group" who happen to also make up part of the Fireflies’ final body-count in the film (and whose lead singer sounds suspiciously like a non-vocoderized Rob. Naughty!).
Don’t think Steve will ever want to go back again, but man, I REALLY liked this one—and I know exactly how sick that makes me look, especially in the eyes of prudes like NPG. But thank God…I really don’t care.;)
Still, the evening made up for it somewhat, at least from my point of view:
agincourtgirl agreed to stay late, which meant Steve and I were able to meet after school and walk straight up to the Paramount to see The Devil’s Rejects.I suppose I should preface my review by admitting that I quite enjoyed House of 1,000 Corpses, for all that I admit—nay, trumpet—its many integral faults. But Rejects is as far away from that candy-colored Hallowe’en monster mash as The Wild Bunch is from High Noon: Rob Zombie has used the intervening time to take his 1970s fetish to the next level, enlarging on the tropes he so adores rather than just referencing them for the sake of: "Hey, man, remember this? Cool fuckin’ beans!", and the result is brutal in a truthful, disturbing, genuinely impactful sort of way. Rather than treating the whole affair (rock-drop downer ending, cannibal family values, sexual torture of the innocent, etc.) like some creepily cheesy horror geekboy theme-park ride starring every obscure 1970s actor he’s ever wanted to work with (plus his wife, her annoying helium giggle, and her all-too-often naked ass), this is a straight-to-hell outlaw Death Trip gone horribly, horribly wrong for everybody involved, even the Groucho character-monickered Fireflies themselves; everything’s dirty, nothing’s pretty, people get what they give, in spades. Which, needless to say, pretty much suits me down to—and under—the cold, hard Texas ground.
My main difficulty with House was that it presupposed a particular reality without ever actually proving it—without working for it, the way a good movie oughtta. If you’re going to show me the Fireflies (Mama, Baby, Otis, Rufus, Tiny [and Grampa, who seems to have disappeared between movies one and two—but then again, there’s an actual temporal gap there: Long enough for Otis to grow a beard, at any rate. So maybe the old bastard simply died, and they chucked him down Dr Satan’s rabbit hole]) living a Sawney Bean/Bloody Benders/Manson Family life of aimless rural crime and grue, just far enough off the beaten path to get away with treating serial murder as a J-O-B rather than a hobby, I need some sort of way to understand the why behind the what: These are people who claim to have a philosophy, after all (or, in one case, an Art). Is it habit, pleasure, necessity, a big middle finger in the face of God and man? How is Captain Spaulding, proprietor of the fabled Murder Ride, involved—is he a parasite, an enabler, a blood relative, all three? They’ll obviously kill at the slightest provocation, but are they willing—or afraid—to die? Do they love each other? Can they really expect to get away with this forever?
Well, Rejects takes those challenges and (literally) runs with them. It puts Baby and Otis, the only two to make it out of the House intact when the cops finally come calling, under pressure from scene one and holds them there ‘till scene zero; it also explains a fair deal about Captain Spaulding, a functional sociopath who finds himself yoked by sex, money and one particular child to a passle of dysfunctional psychopaths. Better yet, it drains all the squicky glamour out of things like Baby’s constant mind-games, Otis’ ranting necrophilia, the captive Mama’s pseudo-nympho Whore of Babylon act (this time ‘round it’s ferocious rather than pathetic, born from a bottomless pit of rage, as though she’s daring The Man to do anything to her that she can’t somehow make herself enjoy)—that Spaulding is the only one of them who can be trusted to run an errand without coming home wearing a human skin mask is fairly sad, and Zombie doesn’t shy away from the fact that his main characters need killing in the worst damn way. The only drawback he finds with the person elected to do said killing, the sheriff played by William Forsythe, is that he’s close enough to the line already to catch the Firelies’ madness like a disease halfway through his otherwise righteous crusade to check them out of existence’s cheap desert motel.
In fact, if I wanted to be all meta about it (and I obviously do), I could float the theory that House, with its mainly-Zombie soundtrack, is the Firefly family’s collective dream of themselves as unbeatable, unkillable monsters, always on top, always holding all the cards. Rejects, OTOH, is what they look like from the outside rather than the in-. This explains the complete lack of closure on that whole demented Dr Satan thang (the only loose thread which could possibly be parlayed into a third film, though Zombie swears he wants to avoid one…if the events of Rejects probably only take a week, the ol’ Doc’s gonna be wanting new experimental subjects and perhaps food sometime quite soon; maybe he’s made himself a walker to match his crane-track thingie, or can get that skinless wresler dude to hoist him back up above), plus the lack of Zombie on the soundtrack, which is entirely made up of period-suitable music. Except for the one track credited to Banjo and Sullivan, of course, a "long-lost 1970s bluegrass group" who happen to also make up part of the Fireflies’ final body-count in the film (and whose lead singer sounds suspiciously like a non-vocoderized Rob. Naughty!).
Don’t think Steve will ever want to go back again, but man, I REALLY liked this one—and I know exactly how sick that makes me look, especially in the eyes of prudes like NPG. But thank God…I really don’t care.;)
