Depravity for Rent

It's not often that I walk into a video rental store and am saddened to see a video for rent. It happened to me this week, though.

The video in question is "The Devil's Rejects" by Rob Zombie. My local video chain had a whole shelf section stocked with copies.

I was first tipped off to this movie by film critic and conservative talk show host Michael Medved, whose take on the movie was that it was so depraved that it should never have been made. Depraved. That's a word you don't hear used in our society. After listening to his hour long segment on the movie I would have to guess that he's probably right.

I don't know if you've ever sat through a movie and then wondered why you paid to see that level of sickness. I have. It was "Silence of the Lambs". Despite it winning a best picture Oscar, I regretted seeing it. It has a level of sickness in it that I can't wipe from my brain.

Is "The Devil's Rejects" depraved? Let's see. Let's here from a different film critic that I normally respect, Roger Ebert, who recommended the movie with 3 stars:

Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre. If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, "The Devil's Rejects" may exercise a certain strange charm. If on the other hand you close your eyes if a scene gets icky, here is a movie to see with blinders on, because it starts at icky and descends relentlessly through depraved and nauseating to the embrace of road kill.

What's the movie about? According to Ebert:

"...it's about a depraved family of mass murderers" who slaughter their way through some revenge plot.

So, if it's a gaudy, nauseating, "vomitorium" why would he recommend it? Says Ebert:

There is actually some good writing and acting going on here, if you can step back from the material enough to see it.

Ahhh. I see. If you can "step back from the material" you can appreciate the mastery of the craft. That in itself is a depraved argument.

I was saddened enough to see it play at my local cineplex, where teens could - with some work - see it and have to live with it in their mind. Now, it's right there on the video rental shelf. How far are we exactly from the Roman collisieum?

Will I rent it? Of course not. But the eager teen who was dragging his clueless mom straight to that shelf will. God help him.