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As it turns out, Hell really doesn’t want them.

We first told you back in October that Rob Zombie was developing a follow-up to The Devil’s Rejects, a film he had been teasing on social media for some time. Earlier this week, our sources scooped us on an update. The rumor, at this time, is that the sequel is filming soon, with the potential title The Devil’s Rejects 2: Three from Hell.

Again, this is all to be taken as rumor at this point in time, but we’ve heard enough to be pretty damn sure that the Firefly family is coming back. But… HOW?

At the end of The Devil’s Rejects, Otis, Baby and Captain Spaulding are gunned down by the police, the murderous trio going out in a blaze of glory while Skynyrd’s “Freebird” plays over the visuals. Zombie made sure to show us that each member of the family was indeed shot, and the suggestion was clear: all three were killed in that epic gunfight.

So if the so-called Devil’s Rejects are definitively dead as of thirteen years ago, how the hell can they come back for a sequel? The key may lie in the title: The Devil’s Rejects.

As implied by the potential title of Three from Hell, Rob Zombie very easily could bring back Otis, Baby and Spaulding by simply playing on the title for the previous film. The moniker “The Devil’s Rejects” implied that even the Devil himself doesn’t want the Firefly clan, so it’s fair to speculate that Zombie will bring them back to life by simply having the Devil, well, spit them back out. “Hell doesn’t want them… Hell doesn’t need them… Hell doesn’t love them,” sings Zombie in his song The Devil’s Rejects, which really says it all.

If they’re not even accepted in Hell, maybe their wrath can continue on Earth. This would of course require Zombie to go supernatural with his sequel to the grounded-in-reality The Devil’s Rejects, but the supernatural just so happens to be something Zombie is really comfortable playing around with. Sure, he killed off his three most memorable characters back in 2005, but how cool would it be to see them walk straight out of the fiery depths of Hell and continue carrying out their murderous deeds here on Earth?

Remember that promo image (above) of the Firefly trio walking down the road, seemingly *after* the shootout on the road? It was never actually featured in the film, and certainly could be looked back on today as the very first image from “Three from Hell.”

Another potential way to bring the Rejects back to life lies in a deleted scene from The Devil’s Rejects, featuring House of 1000 Corpses character Doctor Satan. In the deleted scene, excised because it was a bit too supernatural to fit in with the tone of the rest of the film, we see that Doctor Satan was brought to a nearby hospital after the shootout at the start of The Devil’s Rejects. There he rips out the throat of a nurse, played by Rosario Dawson, and we’re never shown what happens to Doctor Satan from there.

Perhaps Doctor Satan, known to conduct peculiar medical experiments, is the key to bringing Otis, Baby and Spaulding back to life; according to the character’s Wiki bio, “The original tale of Dr. Satan told that he used patients who were near death in experiments.

Just imagine Three from Hell picking up directly after the events of The Devil’s Rejects. Where would the wounded/dying/dead bodies of Otis, Baby and Spaulding be taken to after the shootout on the road? The hospital, perhaps? And who’s lying in wait at the hospital, which Zombie showed us in that aforementioned deleted scene? Yup. The good doctor.

No matter how Zombie chooses/has chosen to go about bringing the Rejects back to life, one thing is for certain: he’ll have to re-embrace the less-than-realistic aesthetic of House of 1000 Corpses, presumably going full-on supernatural with a batshit tale of murderous maniacs coming back from the dead. An exciting prospect, to say the least.

How would YOU like to see Zombie bring the Firefly trio back? Or are they better off dead?

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie

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Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.

This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.

Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.

The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.

You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.

Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.

In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.

In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.

Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.

However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.

Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.

Not a good idea.

Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).

Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.

A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.

At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.

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