I have e-chatted with a reader who says violence doesn't bug her, but she can't handle torture. She'll want to steer clear of "The Devil's Rejects."

The sordid "Rejects," about a band of thrill killers on the lam, is torture-riffic. It is also one of the year's most exciting movies because director Rob Zombie - whose "House of 100 Corpses" mostly demonstrated his ability to photograph naked, busty corpses - has become an inventive filmmaker. Zombie's images are striking, and he has a firm grasp of the idea that creating suspense is all about withholding information until the exact second the audience needs it.

From the murder in the opening credits, which make suspenseful use of "Bonnie and Clyde"-like freeze frames, to the finale, which uses a similar technique and also adds the bizarrely perfect accompaniment of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," "The Devil's Rejects" is one nasty, brilliantly constructed scene after another.

Zombie makes weird casting choices that don't always work (ex-porn star Ginger Lynn is here, and the stars of two cheesy `80s sitcoms, Priscilla "Three's Company" Barnes and Deborah "Too Close for Comfort" Van Valkenburgh, both bleed to death), but most of them do. Zombie obviously digs theatrical craziness, heavy on the drooling and eye-bugging, and his actors are willing to go off the deep end with him.

I suppose you could argue that Zombie also has something to say with "Rejects" - he takes jabs at celebrity culture, and he seems to argue that society has pushed his killers toward getting off on violence instead of sex. But he doesn't spend much time with that, preferring instead to manipulate us with whose-side-are-we-on brutality and unexpected juxtapositions like the shot of a guy going into a bathroom to pee that sound-morphs into a shot of someone pouring coffee into a cup.

Get past the blood spurts, and Zombie turns out to be a filmmaker who possesses a quality that's in short supply at the movies these days: genuine wit. But, make no mistake, this is a bloody, frequently repulsive film. When one character says, "Dyin' isn't an option," he's way off. In "The Devil's Rejects," dyin' is just about the only option.