Apr 032007
 
four reels

Two features and four faux trailers combine to bring back the feeling of 1970s grind house theaters.  In the first feature, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a virus transforms people into mutating zombies.  Mysterious Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), his ex-girlfriend, go-go dancer Cherry (Rose McGowan), an anesthesia dart-wielding doctor, (Marley Shelton), the sheriff (Michael Biehn), and their motley crew must fight off both the monsters and a deranged military unit to survive. In Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) enjoys killing girls with his car.  After several successes, he runs into real problems with a make-up artist (Rosario Dawson) and a pair of stuntwomen (Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms).

Directors Rodriguez and Tarantino attempt to resurrect the meaningless, over-the-top fun of exploitation pictures (the kinds that the two saw in urban “grind houses” when they were younger, though being a suburban kid myself, I viewed by sneaking into the drive-in…  Don’t ask), and they succeed with glorious, blood drenching, testicle removing, leg-ripping, zombie-chewing, car-tumbling excess.  It is a present to anyone who thinks that a hot girl with a machine gun for a leg is cool (by the way, a hot girl with a machine gun for a leg is about as cool as it gets).

The double-feature will make you nostalgic for a theatrical experience that most of you have never had.  The old grind houses were dives that showed moves that generally promised more in their lurid trailers than they could deliver.  The prints were often damaged (one print would travel from theater to theater) and might be missing scenes or an entire reel. Grindhouse brings it all back.  The film is purposely scratched and shakes, particularly when the action gets intense.  In both Planet Terror and Death Proof, segments have been “mislaid” (a joke that would have been better if used only once).  The four trailers for non-existent movies are things of beauty that no feature could ever live up to.  How can you not want to see Werewolf Women of the S.S.?

As good as the trailers are, the prize is Planet Terror, which hits the perfect balance of exciting violence, sickening gore, and laugh-out-loud humor (though for exploitation, it’s low on bare skin).  It never lets up from the moment we’re introduced to Cherry Darling, pole dancing with a tear running down her face, till a climax filled with explosions and a helicopter as a weapon. Rodriguez uses the tropes of the old films, but does them three times bigger and with five times more skill, while always winking at the audience.  I never knew if I should be cringing or laughing, so I did both.

The dialog is mainly memorable one-liners, and fits nicely between scenes of exploding, pus-filled tongues and fingers being bitten off.  Yeah, this isn’t for the timid, but it is so extreme that no one is going to be traumatized.

Death Proof offers one of the best car chases/car duels ever put on film. This is the way it should be done. Tarantino has complained that modern movies have stripped the life out of car chases with CGI and insisted that to really grab an audience, you need to use real cars driving down real roads. He’s proven his point. But outside of automotive jousting, things drag. While Rodriguez was paying homage to grind house movies, Tarantino was creating one. The problem is that most of those films sucked in total or in part. They rarely had enough money so filled up their running time with sleep-inducing talk. Money wasn’t an issue here, but we’re still stuck with the non-stop chatter. First one group of girls talk about nothing for a half hour, than another group takes over and does the same thing. The conversations sound real, which brings up the question: Why do I want to hear some random girls’ conversation.  I could hang out in mall food courts if that was a big thrill. It’s as if Tarantino is trying to recreate the beginning of Pulp Fiction, but without the wit, and five times longer. The colliding cars make Death Proof worth your time, but you have to suffer to get to the good.

As a whole, Grindhouse is one of the better movie-going experiences I’ve had in 2007. It’s insane, juvenile fun. It’s uneven, but hey, these are exploitation films; they aren’t supposed to be consistent.

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