(All this talk of zombies of late got me to remembering a ghoul-filled flick that was a lot more fun than one being forced upon us this summer. These were my impressions of Rodriquez' and Tarantino's "Grindhouse," originally published April 7th, 2007)
I recall the
heady days of the tin-roofed hangout my friends and I used for our weekend-long
fests full of Frito-Lay products, carbonated drinks, Dungeons & Dragons and
poorly-recorded-pornography-off-of-satellite-television. These were the dark ages of VHS tapes,
portable 13-inch televisions and VCRs as large as a shipping crate, all dragged
down to that shack and rigged for watching crap only teenage boys could
love. My fellow geeks and I watched Mad
Max this way, we watched Trinity is Still My Name this
way, we watched Flesh and Blood this way. Ah, good times…
It turns out
that, halfway across the continent, Robert Rodriguez was watching some of these
very same movies in much the same way, and on the other side of the continent,
Quentin Tarantino was doing the same.
Unlike me and my friends, however, these two fellows later took the next
few steps up the geek-evolution ladder and began making their own schlock
movies (well, “schlock” is a subjective term; some would use “masterpieces” – I’m
not saying I would, but some might), and Grindhouse is what seems
to be a culmination of that evolution.
Tarantino and
Rodriguez, great friends and frequent collaborators, have produced an un-usual
event for today’s commercial cinema – and that’s exactly what Grindhouse
is – an event. We are presented with a
true double feature, two movies for one ticket price, along with trailers for
other similar (and non-existent) movies directed by directors such as Rob
Zombie and Eli Roth, fellow members of the current class of schlock/slasher
directors to which Tarantino and Rodriguez also belong. This is more than three hours of
hoot-and-holler entertainment, and if you can accept it for what it is, and
have the good fortune to see it in a theater with other reprobates who shared
similar adolescent experiences to mine, you’ll have a blast seeing it.
Rodriguez’ Planet
Terror, his homage to the countless zombie movies he loved as a youth,
and Tarantino’s Death Proof, his addition to the great muscle-car
flicks he loved, are paired as a double feature and titled with the term
applied to the poorly-run and –managed theaters that once showed these type
movies to hormone-fueled boys, and the girls who for some reason would
accompany them, so often that the prints would eventually become
unwatchable. Both movies are bad. I’ll put that out there up front, but I must
admit that they’re both good-bad, if that makes any sense. Both segments are bad in the sense that
they’re enjoyable, and I really believe that was the intention of both
filmmakers. There are scratches and dust
and lint on the prints, more so in Planet Terror than in Death
Proof. We hear projector
noise. We see burnt cells throughout the
print. There are missing reels from both
features, intentional on the parts of Rodriguez and Tarantino, as sometimes
happened in those old grindhouse theaters, something that would be greatly
frustrating in more “serious” pictures, but somehow doesn’t matter all that
much in this pulp fare.
Planet
Terror leads off the twin-bill, and the opening
titles sequence of Rose McGowan go-go dancing is almost worth the admission
price (please excuse me, my teenage hormones seem to have returned for a short
while…). The plot is not terribly
important, because it seems to me that if you’ve seen one zombie movie, you’ve
pretty much seen most all of them, so I won’t waste space here summarizing
it. The 90-minute movie is full of pus,
ooze and gore from start to finish, along with bad (read: funny) one-liners and
lots of explosions. How this film
escaped an NC-17 rating is beyond me, but I guess, as the old saying goes, what
should you expect from a pig but a grunt?
If I didn’t want to be grossed out, I shouldn’t have bought the
ticket. Long on action, short on
exposition and moving quickly from beginning to end, Planet Terror
is the more exciting of the two entries overall, but Tarantino’s contribution
certainly has its merits, too.
Before Death
Proof opens, however, are trailers for “upcoming attractions,” as the
title card calls them. They are for
similar examples of cinematic genius (cough, cough…), with titles such as Werewolf
Women of the SS and Don’t, and while these movies really
don’t exist, I’m sure folks who frequent such movies wish they did. One of these trailers even features an Oscar
winning-actor, but I’ll leave it for you to discover who that may be. The gore factor is prevalent even in these,
as the trailers for Machete and Thanksgiving are
over-the-top repulsive almost to the point of being ridiculous. Again, of what drugs the MPAA was partaking
when screening this for a rating is beyond me.
Finally, Death
Proof begins. If Tarantino has
done nothing else for me and my geek brethren with this film, he has given us
back Kurt Russell. It’s so nice to see
the man who was Snake Plissken and Jack Burton back on the screen, and not the
guy who was in that horse movie with Dakota Fanning or the guy playing the
Olympic hockey coach. Russell is
Stuntman Mike (no other names are really necessary), who stalks a group of
pretty girls with his “death-proof” Hollywood-equipped stunt car and uses it as
his murder weapon. The second group of
girls he stalks turns the tables on him with their own muscle car, culminating
in a fantastic high-speed car chase/battle that, in my humble opinion, is at
least worthy of discussion alongside those from French Connection,
Bullitt and John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Again, like Planet Terror, the
plot is not terribly important, and is actually even less-developed than
Rodriguez’ film. It left me with a few
unanswered questions about both Stuntman Mike and the film’s heroines, but I
personally enjoyed it more because of the climactic chase sequence and
Tarantino’s wonderful dialogue through-out the 85-minute film. If you were as enamored of some of John
Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s conversations in Pulp Fiction as
I was, you’ll find the female equivalents here to be almost as entertaining.
So,
is it worth seeing? I think so, and I
really think you should. I still have
enough geek in me that I find three-plus hours of bullets, profanity, fast cars
and scantily-clad women enjoyable, and if you know me well enough that you’re
reading this, you probably do, too. All
in all, Grindhouse is the movie-going equivalent of a
roller-coaster ride: dumb, but something that some people find to be loads of
fun, especially if experienced as part of a loud crowd. I don’t really see this double feature being
anywhere near as much fun in your own living room, no matter how large your
television, as the oohs and aahs and gasps and yelps coming from fellow viewers
in a darkened theater are a large part of the fun here. But, I could be wrong. After all, I sure had a blast with that
little 13-inch television showing a VHS copy of Enter the Dragon
all those years ago. Now please excuse
me, I’m suddenly having a craving for a Mountain Dew and some Funyuns…
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