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…

World War Zzzzzz...

What does $200 million of Paramount’s money get you these days?  Certainly not a fantastic Star Trek movie – that was proven last month.  World War Z proves that it can buy you a gaggle of screenwriters, if you define a “gaggle” as five or more.  The completed movie, however, proves that said gaggle of screenwriters can’t guarantee you an interesting, much less coherent, screenplay.

It’s been said that when a popular genre reaches a point where filmmakers are producing comedies or parodies of it, that’s a sure sign the genre has all but “played out.”  While World War Z may not be a parody (Warm Bodies, from earlier this year, would better fit that bill), it’s at least a sign that the zombie genre is almost dried up from a dramatic viewpoint.  If the old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth is relatable to filmmaking, then a slew of names under the “written by” credit should be taken as a cause for concern.  Brad Pitt’s production company won a bidding war five or six years ago for the rights to Max Brooks’ (son of Mel) novel about the oral history of a worldwide zombie pandemic.  Of course, this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to that novel, outside of its title and the fact that there are zombies in it, but Hollywood knows best, so out goes all the introspective, human stories and in goes swarms and swarms of computer-generated zombie termites, crashing helicopters, artillery fire and nuclear explosions.  Heaven forbid should somebody make a movie about people describing their experiences in such a fantastically terrifying time as a zombie apocalypse – nobody would want that, right? 

Pitt cast himself in the lead role, that of one Gerry Lane (a name which, for some reason, planted a Beatles’ song in my head and never let it go), who before his recent retirement, was some sort of go-to investigator-type guy for the United Nations at one point, although the movie doesn’t bother explaining any more than that to us.  He, his wife and two daughters manage to escape Philadelphia, by way of Newark, as the pandemic breaks out, narrowly and miraculously avoiding swarming death several times before being rescued and taken out to a helicopter carrier which serves as… Oh, screw it.  None of it matters, because you’ve seen all this before!  Did you see 28 Days Later?  Then you’ve seen this.  Did you see the pilot episode of “The Walking Dead?”  Then you’ve seen this.  The filmmakers have spurned a totally original take on the zombie-movie provided to them by the source novel for which they paid an astronomical sum of money, and instead chosen to make a zombie flick as they imagine Roland Emmerich might have.

Okay, sure, the zombies here evoke “hive” or “swarm” behavior, similar to flocks of birds or colonies of insects, presaged by images of those creatures in the opening credits.  This could be construed as slightly different from some other zombie flicks, but why do they behave this way?  Well, not only is that never explained, we’re also never even given a hint about what actually started all of this.  Oh, sure, there are couple lines of dialogue about somebody biting a doctor in Korea, and the Indian Army “fighting the undead,” but those plot points are never explored.

Gerry’s wife and kids? What about them?  They’re nothing more than a plot device, giving Gerry a reason to call back to the command ship and serendipitously get information that leads him to the movie’s next CGI-created set-piece.  Heck, for all we learn about those characters, “wife and kids” is really all the identification they require.  When a senior military official refers to them as “non-essential personnel” at one point, I wondered for a second if it was meant as a joke.

Why Brad Pitt would be so devoted to such a project that he would throw a good chunk of his own money at it sort of baffles me, too.  Don’t kid yourself, folks – Pitt considers himself a “serious” actor, and maybe with exception of Troy, has never done the “summer blockbuster” movie before.  What’s even more baffling is how the movie we finally get to see is a lot LESS a spectacle picture than was originally intended.  The final forty minutes of the movie are a complete rewrite/reshoot, eliminating a third act that would have centered around a massive zombie battle all throughout Moscow (a good portion of which was actually even filmed, but now won’t see the light of day) into the more intimate, thriller-type ending we get now.  I’ve read of how the original ending played poorly with test audiences, as well as Paramount executives, and how screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the man who made such an absolute mess of the Prometheus script last year, was brought aboard to formulate a new ending.  While that ending is the most zombie movie-like story arc of the entire film, it’s too little/too late by that point.  We’ve learned so little about Gerry, much less the characters who inhabit the medical research facility in which he finds himself, that it’s hard to feel much dread over what possible horrible fate may await him.

I’ve said in some previous review that once you’ve seen one zombie movie, then for the most part, you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all, and that remains so.  Given that semi-debatable fact, the only thing that can differentiate one zombie flick from another is the stable of characters inhabiting the story.  Since I really don’t know any more about Gerry Lane, his wife and/or his kids at the end of this movie than I did at the beginning, much less any cause for the pandemic, was their any point in my seeing it, other than to see that Paramount was willing to spend $200 million to convince me zombies can clickity-clack their teeth and swarm like ants…?