RIDE, RACE & DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

REVIEWED - THE DEVIL'S REJECTS: At a crucial point in Rob Zombie's raucous, nauseating follow-up to House of 1000 Corpses, as bodies pile up and innocent women are forced to wear the flayed faces of their husbands, the evil sheriff decides he needs to call in an expert

"Get that movie critic guy over here," he yells to his deputy. Excellent. We are tired of seeing cops in films relying on pathologists, profilers or forensic scientists. It's about time the people who really know what they're talking about were consulted.

What might the critic - he of the fat, flustered, blazer-wearing school - say about The Devil's Rejects? Well, take away the nods to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the steals from Sam Peckinpah and there would be little left of the film bar sprocket holes. There is no structure to speak of. Many scenes are overextended to accommodate showy set-pieces.

Worst of all, Mr Zombie asks us to shift our allegiances back and forth between the killers and the shortly-to-be-killed with dizzying frequency. One minute we are chewing our knuckles as a group of country musicians is carved up in a motel room. The next we are cheering as the loveable psychopaths drive defiantly towards a police road-block.

But, though composed almost entirely of flaws, The Devil's Rejects manages to get by on its dusty 1970s ambience, its feel for the Texas locations and its astonishing capacity for discovering new ways of debasing the blameless. Like The Passion of the Christ - though here the resemblance ends - Zombie's opus is hideously, ruthlessly violent, but will play pretty well to a specialist audience.

The film begins with the police turning up at the cabin of Mother Firefly, leader of a family of psychopathic killers whose members are named for characters played by Groucho Marx (hence the need for the film critic). Mom is captured and the remaining Fireflies go on the lam while the pigs - the only people we are never asked to side with - scour the country in pursuit.

Zombie has found a terrific cast of oddballs to give flesh (and blood and viscera) to his unpleasant creations and, assisted by a fine rock soundtrack, these goons allow every scene to buzz with stinky energy, even if the overall design is a mess. Anybody impressed by the news that Michael Berryman, the bald nutter from The Hills Have Eyes, has a cameo should have a ball. Most everybody else should stay away.