Perhaps Grindhouse is one of the few movies that the experience alone is worth the admission price; because not unlike Snakes on a Plane, it’s a film that takes pride in its own ridiculousness. Even if you don’t necessarily consider Planet Terror and Death Proof to be good cinema, you can still enjoy the lewd presentation, the nostalgic visuals, and the atmosphere of a rowdy “grindhouse” crowd. It’s another one of those movies that benefits from a participating audience, although it’s certainly still very much fun on its own.
Planet Terror is exactly the movie you expect it to be: loud, over the top, gory, and full of excess. Robert Rodriguez has created a film that, quite literally, leaves no room for a breather. Pretty much every scene is jam-packed full of giddy, disgusting gore and rousing action set pieces. It would have been tiresome, and it's close to being so, if it didn’t keep offering one inventive sequence after another. To achieve this non-stop barrage of exploitation, Rodriguez combined every form of it imaginable. Zombies, kung fu, sleazy sex, nurse fetish, and explosive action extravaganza that is anything but tact; all serve to be the spices in a pedestrian zombie premise. Evil men cause special gas to leak, zombies appear, gang of badass people fight back; it’s not a story or structure that you haven’t seen a million times before in a million zombie movies. Rather than a true “grindhouse” flick, though, Planet Terror feels more like a piss-take on the style. The scratches, the missing reel, the lens malfunctioning – they are all exaggerated and used comically. It’s a whole load of fun, mainly because there are plenty of revolting effects (courtesy of the always reliable KNB team) that will make you churn and laugh at the same time, but it all just seems a little easy. All Rodriguez had to do, really, was find more ways to show a zombie deteriorate.
In contrast, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is a fantastic thrill ride – puns are welcomed here at the Grindhouse – that takes a while to set up but pays off in a remarkable way. Though it might feel long-winded, especially after all the eye-candy and bullet-fast pacing of Planet Terror, Death Proof is very concise and straight-to-the-point. The film is divided into three acts that are essentially three very long scenes. In the first one, the dangerously playful Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) stalks a group of women in a bar, and end up killing all of them on the road afterwards. At first, it tricks you into thinking that the women are the main characters, but it’s really Stuntman Mike and his death-proofed muscle car that are being introduced. In the second act, we meet a different group of women as they try to procure a 1970 Dodge Challenger from the cult classic film Vanishing Point.
As usual, Tarantino uses nothing but dialogue to build his characters. In this case, the four women come alive and set themselves apart from one another just by talking around a restaurant table. Their conversations are fun to join and they make the girls likable. Later, Tarantino pulls out all the stops in the third act to pay off all the dialogue-heavy set-up, by devoting the final third entirely to one long mesmerizing car chase sequence that’s both scary and full of excitement. There’s something about dangerous stunts that really put a stake in your heart, and Death Proof shows how to hammer it right. The movie is very simple, but very effective. Unlike Planet Terror, the “grindhouse” elements of Death Proof are more subdued, giving the film a more authentic look. The crappy editing/projection doesn’t feel forced and used more as a signature rather than a joke.
The fake trailers and lousy food commercials in-between are a lot of fun. Opener Machete is a blast, Eli Roth’s obvious Halloween spoof Thanksgiving is the funniest, and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS is imaginative and outlandish; but the gem here is Edgar Wright’s Don’t, a homage-parody to Dario Argento-style giallo horror that manages to both capture Argento’s sense of surrealism and pokes fun at the repetitiveness of ‘70s trailers.
The bottom line is, there’s something wrong with you if you don’t enjoy yourself going to Grindhouse. It’s hard to say which film should have gone first. Death Proof’s first two acts certainly slow down the momentum Planet Terror built up, but the final act is so satisfying that it’s hard to imagine Grindhouse ending any other way. Look at it this way: if these two were truly made in the ‘70s, today Planet Terror would be a cult hit like The Re-Animator, but Death Proof would be the fondly-remembered great classic like The Road Warrior. They’re two aesthetically different films, but they both don’t disappoint. You’ll get a lot of bang for your buck.
"Grindhouse" opens April 6, 2007 and is rated . . Written by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez.
