A one-shot to tie in with Rob Zombie’s delightfully demented film of the same name (which just came out on DVD), THE DEVIL’S REJECTS tells three too-brief tales of terror of the murderous Firefly family, scripted by Zombie himself.
First up is “Top Secret Clown Business,” about the Gacy-esque Capt. Spaulding having a nightmare in which he’s killed in various ways. The script is as fractured as a dream, and the art too dark and monotone. Much brighter is “Carnival Kill Ride,” which has Otis and Baby so bored at a haunted house ride that they decide to slaughter other attendees just for the heck of it. It’s fairly pointless, with loads of violence for violence’s sake, but at least it reminds one of the candy-coated color scheme of HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, which introduced these love-to-hate characters.
The last of the trio is “Psycho-Babble,” in which Sigmund Freud – resurrected via time machine – breaks down the id, ego and superego of each of the sociopathic REJECTS. The art here is probably the best of the bunch, even though the script probably took as much time to write as it does to read, which is almost no time at all.
Even for hardcore fans, this thin, standalone issue is non-essential. None of the three stories feel like anything beyond sketches – punchlines without an adequate setup. Zombie remains an extremely talented filmmaker, but this is not his best comics work; for an example of that, I strongly recommend BIGFOOT, of which I still can’t get enough.
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