GRINDHOUSE

Grindhouse is Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grungy hymn to the cheap dingy theatres that showed endless double and triple features of wild exploitation movies in the ‘70s. A specious enterprise, indeed, but it’s like a theme park ride, a complete recreation that comes with fake trailers, “Our Feature Presentation” in cheesy swirls of psychedelic colour, animated film clips gleefully announcing the “Restricted” rating of each film, and even a scratchy ad for a tex-mex restaurant within ‘walking distance of the theatre.’

Now if only theatre owners would paste fake vomit on the theatre floor, rip up seats, and hire actors to portray down-and-out theatre patrons to hurl abuse at the screen and their neighbours, and we’d really be in business.

The core of the Grindhouse experience is, of course, two feature-length films, albeit both featuring a ‘missing reel’ (strategically placed in movie moments that get a big laugh--one getting the director out of a plot corner, the other cruelly depriving us of some sleaziness). Bottom line: Rodriguez’ Planet Terror is wildly fun but overly self-referential and parodying, while Tarantino’s Death Proof is a genuine movie and a worthy follow-up to Kill Bill.


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Planet Terror involves the release into the atmosphere of an evil bioweapon gas that turns people into gooey, blistered zombies intent, George Romero-style, on devouring any hapless victims in their path. El Wray (Freddy Rodríguez) is the mysterious gunman, ripped from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, who emerges as the reluctant saviour of a hodge podge of uninfected humans. His former lover Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) has her leg torn off by zombies, and Wray helpfully provides an assault rifle as an artificial limb, which leads to much enjoyable silliness as Cherry jumps and spins around while blowing apart biozoms with her handy appendage.

All the key beats of ’70s and ’80s sci-fi/horror are here, resulting in a stew of sleaze, gooey violence, weird characters, handheld POV camera, Rio Bravo-like last stands, and escapes from hordes of pustuled creatures, all underscored to a music track that mashes up electric guitar and Carpenteresque synths. The film even morphs briefly to one of those cheesy postapocalyptic nomad films that were shoved into existence post-Mad Max.

Even with its smug, winking tone of self-parody, Planet Terror is more fun than it has any right to be, thanks mainly to its sheer kinetic energy. The film is digitally scratched up to approximate the look and feel of a cheap exploitation film, but features some digital effects that are clearly beyond anything such films could afford, resulting in a strange hybrid of re-enactment and the fevered hopes of viewers that these films could possibly, maybe, live up to the promise of their trailers and posters. With its tongue firmly in its post-modern cheek, Planet Terror is hugely entertaining, but would not stand on its own outside of the Grindhouse theme ride.


Tarantino’s Death Proof, on the other hand, is a genuinely good film that happens to use the grindhouse style to tell its story. Subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. In Death Proof, Tarantino mixes up the car chase and female revenge genres with his unique dialogue-driven sensibility. The film follows two groups of women and their encounters with psycho ex-stunt driver Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, reminding us he has serious acting chops) and his ‘death proof’ movie stunt car, which he uses as a weapon to slaughter pretty young women that take his fancy. So, in a way, I guess the slasher genre is represented here also.

The second group of women, headed by Zoe Bell (playing herself, a stuntwoman who doubled for Uma Therman in Kill Bill), eventually get the upper hand in a final car chase sequence that forgoes any digital effects work and delivers some great, old-school gritty stunt work. It’s not really an action picture, though, it’s a Tarantino picture through and through. More than any of his films since Pulp Fiction, there are reams and reams of fascinating dialogue delivered by fleshed-out characters, something that will likely turn off a sizeable chunk of the audience that may be attracted to this whole double-feature in the first place.

However, if you’re hip to this kind of stuff, and can shift like Tarantino between cinematic smarts and pulp exploitation, Death Proof is heady stuff.


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Planet Terror

Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Starring:
Freddy Rodríguez...Wray
Rose McGowan...Cherry
Michael Biehn...Sheriff Hague
Naveen Andrews...Abby
Josh Brolin...Dr. William Block
Marley Shelton...Dr. Dakota Block

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Death Proof

Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring:
Kurt Russell...Stuntman Mike
Zoe Bell...Herself
Rosario Dawson...Abernathy
Tracie Thoms...Kim
Sydney Tamiia Poitier...Jungle Julia
Jordan Ladd...Shanna