Reminiscing about the "Grindhouse."

(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…

Tarantino lays it on pretty thick with "Django Unchained"

Ah... the Antebellum South.  What a fairy-tale land, awash in mint juleps, and excellent manners.  What a grand time of ladies in hoop skirts, nattily-dressed gentlemen, and children who actually understood that they were meant to be seen and not heard.  What a more genteel world it must have been back then!  Even the indentured servants were happy with their lot in life (or so we were always told…).  If this is your notion of the Antebellum South, dear reader, then Quentin Tarantino spits great, big, fat loogies on it, and with Django Unchained, paints a two-hour and forty-five minute picture of him doing it.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s Western, or his “Southern,” as he himself calls it, which is perhaps a more appropriate term.  It’s his homage to the Spaghetti Westerns he so loves, which suits me fine, as I’m rather fond of the few of them I’ve seen, too.  Borrowing his title character’s name from the 1966 Italian-made Western Django, Tarantino crafts a story of Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist/bounty hunter (played by the baddie from Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz) who obtains a slave (Jamie Foxx) who can identify some certain wanted men Schultz is seeking.  Django has been separated from his wife as a result of their being sold to separate buyers, but Schultz offers Django a partnership of sorts – if Django helps him find his quarry, then he’ll grant Django his freedom and help him find his wife.  They eventually find her in the ownership of plantation owner Calvin Candie, played repulsively by Leonardo DiCaprio, and being supervised by Candie’s chief House slave Stephen, played almost-even-more repulsively by Samuel L. Jackson. 

As a general rule, those of us who are Tarantino fans like his work, and those of us who aren’t his fans don’t like his work.  I count myself among his fans, and I find that there’s usually not much to be gained by trying to convert a non-fan – either you is a fan or you ain’t.  First and foremost, I love his dialogue.  Sure, some folks grouse about the gratuitous profanity his characters spew, but I've never found it to be outside of the logic of whatever story he's telling. Tarantino has consistently created characters and situations full of interesting and/or hilarious conversation, and the number of pop culture reference-worthy quotes we all find familiar is proof of how good at it he is. 

Secondly, it’s hard to deny that Tarantino has a great eye.  He shows us yet again how wonderfully he can frame shots, with Schultz and Django traversing snowy mountains, muddy frontier towns and sprawling cotton plantations.  Some great locations in Wyoming and Northern California, and Louisiana substituting for Texas and Mississippi, help him compose images that we might expect to see in some Sergio Leone picture from years ago. 

The first two acts of the movie progress quickly through Django and Schultz’s forming their partnership and hunting the owners of Django’s wife.  It seems that Django is a “natural” with a gun, and takes to the bounty-hunting business like the proverbial fish to water.  He makes Schultz a great partner, as well as a good friend.  These two characters are alike in so many ways, yet so different in their societal place, that the way they interact and deal with the situations in which they find themselves is fun to watch. 

It’s the final third of the film, however, where the story starts to lose me.  Django has a final showdown with his wife’s owners and their lackeys, which any good Western would be remiss to not include, and of course, that showdown must be a shootout.   Everyone understands that violence exaggerated to ludicrous levels is a Tarantino trademark, and is most often used by him for comedic effect, but I don’t recall the splatter and spray from his earlier films being anything near what he utilizes here.  Sure, sure, I should probably expect a tad more crimson in a Western (Southern) shootout than I would from films like Jackie Brown, or even Inglourious Basterds, but geez, Louise!  Even the two Kill Bill chapters, which are basically revenge movies, don’t have the geysers of blood flowing like is flowing here.  I don’t mind gore one bit when it’s logical, but it seems to me that, for the first time in his career, Tarantino has shoveled it on to the point it’s a distraction from the story he’s trying to tell, and no good movie should ever take the audience out of a story’s flow. 

Tarantino has publicly said that he intended to tackle the horrible subject of slavery with this film because no one else has had the nerve or the right to do so, but I don’t think he recalls numerous other works (Spielberg’s The Color Purple, or Alex Haley’s books, to name just two) that have addressed the subject, and done so with a bit more level-headedness.  For example, I certainly hope his inclusion of “Mandingo fighting,” gladiator-like fights to the death between slaves, is merely an exercise in artistic license, as there is no historical evidence that any such practice ever took place.  Quint may have been born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it seems his living in California since the age of two has purged him of any allegiance to the Land of the old Confederacy he might have had. 

Django Unchained is a pretty good film on the whole, but not Tarantino’s best.  As a fan of his work, I’m glad I saw it, but I hope the subject of his next movie is one about which he might be able to exercise a bit more artistic restraint.