Tom Towles

The Devil's Rejects

On May 18, 1978, Texas Sheriff John Quincey Wydell and a large posse of state troopers issue a search and destroy mission on the Firefly family, who are responsible for over 75 homicides and disappearances over the past several years. The family arm themselves and fire on the officers. Rufus is killed and Mother Firefly is taken into custody while Otis and Baby escape. They steal a car and, after killing the driver, they go to Kahiki Palms, a run-down motel. At the motel, Otis and Baby take hostage a musical group called Banjo and Sullivan in their room, and Otis shoots the roadie when he returns. Meanwhile, Baby's father, Captain Spaulding, decides to rendezvous with Baby and Otis. En route, his truck runs out of gas, and he frightens a boy and assaults the boy's mother before stealing her car. Back at the motel, Otis rapes Roy's wife Gloria and demands Adam and Roy come with him on an errand. Otis drives his two prisoners to a place where he buried weapons. While walking to the location, the two prisoners attack Otis, but Otis bludgeons Roy and cuts Adam's face off. Back at the motel, Adam's wife Wendy tries to escape through the bathroom window. When Gloria attempts to rebel, Baby kills her. Wendy runs out of the motel but is caught by Captain Spaulding, who knocks her unconscious. Otis returns, and all three leave the motel together in the band's van. The motel maid comes to clean the room, and she discovers the murder scene. The maid enters the bathroom where she sees "The Devil's Rejects" written on the wall in blood; she is startled by Wendy, who is accidentally killed when she runs out to the highway to seek help while she is in shock. Wydell calls a pair of amoral bounty hunters—the "Unholy Two"—Rondo and Billy Ray, to help him find the Fireflys. While investigating, they discover an associate of Spaulding's named Charlie Altamont. Wydell begins to lose his sanity when Mother Firefly reveals that she murdered his brother. After having a dream in which his brother commands him to avenge his death, Wydell stabs Mother Firefly to death. The surviving Fireflys gather at a brothel owned by Charlie, where he offers them shelter from the police. After he leaves the brothel, Wydell threatens Charlie to give up the Fireflys. With the help of the "Unholy Two," the sheriff takes the family back to the Firefly house where he tortures them, using similar methods they used on their own victims. He nails Otis' hands to his chair and staples crime-scene photographs to Otis's and Baby's stomachs, then he beats and shocks Captain Spaulding and Otis with a cattle prod and taunts Baby about the death of her mother. Wydell sets the house on fire and leaves Otis and Spaulding to burn, but he lets Baby loose outside so he can hunt her for sport. Charlie returns to save the Firefly family, but he is killed by Wydell. Baby gets shot in the calf of her left leg, brutally horse-whipped, and then strangled by Wydell. Tiny suddenly arrives and intervenes, breaking Wydell's neck and saving the Firefly family. Otis, Baby, and Spaulding escape in Charlie's 1972 Cadillac Eldorado, leaving behind Tiny, who walks back into the burning house. The trio drives, badly injured and seemingly humbled by their experience with a clearer understanding of the torment and anguish that they had put their past victims through. As Otis drives down the road with Baby and Spaulding asleep in the back seat he notices a police barricade ahead of them. Realizing that they will not make it out alive, he wakes Baby and Spaulding and hands them each a gun. As a song playing on the radio declares they "can't change," they speed toward the barricade, guns blazing as the police return fire.