The brilliant fake trailers screened at the halfway point of the Rodriguez-Tarantino double-feature Grindhouse are, perhaps, the best proof that the film is better in concept than execution.
These contributions-from directors Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie, to name a few-noodle with ridiculous ideas for B-movies, tongue firmly in cheek. However, the edgy trailers are the best part of the entire Grindhouse experience.
A conceptual package deal, Grindhouse is two films designed for a back-to-back presentation-harking back to old double features, with fake trailers completing the ensemble. The movie is better judged as a wholesale experience than by the sum of its lazy parts. It’s a fun throwback to the exploitation B-movies of the seventies, which were chock-full of unadulterated sex and violence. In their day, these decidedly un-artsy flicks were confined to low-budget exhibition theatres where the doorman and projectionist were usually the same person and technical difficulties were common.
Complete with all the old hallmarks of the experience-missing reels, the aforementioned fake trailers, and some purposefully mutilated frames-Grindhouse is a B-movie geek’s wet dream. It playfully hits every mark that fans of the genre crave and expect. There are big guns, muscle cars, barrels of guts and gore, and limbs in various stages of mutilation. Good, bad and ugly, Grindhouse has it all, which comes as no surprise with a running time that knifes its way past the three hour mark.
Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie-romp starring the charming Rose McGowan and her prosthetic sub-machine gun leg, is the most consistent (and outlandish) of the two features. Though it mostly meets expectations rather than exceeding them (exception: bonus points for some cool stock-footage gimmickry) Planet Terror is still not a bad place for shlock movie lovers to be.
FILM review
Grindhouse
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
& Quentin Tarantino
Starring Rose McGowan, Kurt Russell
Rating: VVVv
On the other hand, Tarantino’s uneven Death Proof is a little too much of a B-movie. Its weakest points are mostly in its opening reels, with dingy picture quality and deliberately rough edits that go a little too far in imitating the flaws of movies past. The dusty road landscape, which recalls every shitty muscle-car movie my foggy memory can muster, is both a strength and a weakness.
In another of Tarantino’s trademarked casting choices, Death Proof stars Kurt Russell as a scarfaced serial killer by the name Stuntman Mike. This creepy gearhead stalks female prey in his muscle car, whose roar stirs the endless dust long before the mean machine comes into sight. The best part of Death Proof is Mike’s rapport with his female marks, which, in typical Tarantino style, is both sinister and compellingly meticulous.
After a juicy first half-with a few heads suffering extreme tire-burn along the way-Death Proof grinds to a screeching halt. The arrival of a fresh female quartet, led by Rosario Dawson, marks a gear-change to canned banter, indulgent pop-cultural references, and a fatal lack of wit and charm.
It’s an aimless and awkward stretch for the film, with neither Tarantino’s remarkable talent nor B-movie nostalgia rescuing the dull scenes, and it makes us wonder whether Tarantino’s heart was really in it.
On the whole, Rodriguez and Tarantino do a commendable job of recreating a theatre experience most of us missed out on.
Two of the excellent fake trailers are made by directors who have churned out dumbass slasher sleaze of their own-Roth’s Hostel and Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. In a better world, these guys would be restricted to making filler, and Tarantino would supply the real goods.
