After "Sin City," "Hostel" and the "Kill Bill" movies, it seems appropriate that "Grindhouse" is being sold as some sort of epic exploitation film. Featuring "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof," the double feature pays homage to Grindhouse cinema, a 1970s style of filmmaking dependent on shock value.
These movies revolved around and relied on the outrageous obscenities present onscreen. Due to the vulgarity, only the most outlandish of movie theaters would screen the films, resulting in very few copies, which in turn caused the overused copies to be scratchy at times.
"Grindhouse," directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, goes out of its way to recreate the past. Along with the two films, which are complete with scratched out frames and missing reels, this package of nostalgia includes ridiculous faux trailers for Grindhouse-esque movies directed by filmmakers like Eli Roth ("Hostel") and Rob Zombie ("The Devil's Rejects").
From the beginning, both films promise to be nothing short of extremely enjoyable - and not much more. The first feature, Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," stars Freddy Rodriguez ("Bobby") as El Rey, a gun slinging bad ass who happens to run into his ex-flame Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan, "The Black Dahlia") during a zombie invasion. This invasion is thanks to war vet Bruce Willis and his henchmen attempting to steal radioactive materials that are then released into the air.
What follows is a silly slew of vicious action, surged by corny one-liners, cheesy romance and over the top gore. It's fun, it's short and it's sweet. Rodriguez knows that all of this is B-movie madness, and that's what makes the whole thing entertaining. When a character's head is blown off, the audience laughs with Rodriguez, rather than at him.
One of the highlights of "Terror" is Cherry Darling's machine gun leg. Between launching missiles and blowing down soldiers with bullets, McGowan takes her place in Hollywood as the sexiest starlet with a weapon for a limb. And there's no denying the pleasure of watching Fergie get eaten alive by zombies in the film's first ten minutes. It truly is the little things in life that make us happy.
While Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" serves up a juicy pile of pleasurable crap, Tarantino's "Death Proof," the second feature, serves up nothing worth remembering. The movie stars Kurt Russell ("Poseidon") as Stuntman Mike, a rebel who likes killing girls with his black Ford Challenger. Unfortunately, Russell is in the movie for about twenty minutes, leaving another hour for "the girls" to go through what one can only assume Tarantino thought was character development. What the audience gets, however, is an hour's worth of tired, uninspired dialogue that rides along on flat jokes, uninteresting small talk and undeniably annoying girl chatter.
Didn't Tarantino watch the B-movies that supposedly inspired "Grindhouse?" It seems that Rodriguez was hiding something from his counterpart. For minutes upon minutes scenes of stunted conversation go around on a cyclical pattern of the same phrases being uttered over and over again. There have been poorly made wannabe Tarantino movies that are better written than "Death Proof," which ironically was written by Tarantino himself.
Granted, the car chase chorography in "Proof" is good filmmaking, and extremely engaging, but it's just not worth the wait. One can only imagine the criticism that would have beset the writer of "Death Proof," had that writer not been Quentin "Pulp Fiction" Tarantino. Didn't the man reinvent the screenplay for the '90s? He's heralded for his small-time writing. So imagine my surprise when I walked out of the theatre realizing that I enjoyed the writing of the guy who made "Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D" more than the writing of the guy who brought us the cult classic "Reservoir Dogs."
It appears that Tarantino was too preoccupied with writing a "Tarantino" movie to bother with writing an appealing movie. Whatever the reason, "Planet Terror" jumps to a level of fun "Death Proof" can't match. Although Tarantino may still have that essence of cool, it's nowhere to be found in this one punch double feature.
