Disagree? Email Tom Leupp and let em' have it! (tleupp@reelzchannel.com)
A three-hour cinematic circle-jerk that starts out well but ultimately disappoints.
Grindhouse, the double-barreled tribute to 60s and 70s exploitation cinema from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, is a massive exercise in filmmaker self-indulgence, a voyeuristic experience where the audience is invited to watch as two directors essentially get their rocks off on celluloid. Replete with fake trailers and missing reels, the movie aims to recreate the Grindhouse ethos the directors remember so fondly.
Rodriguez and Tarantino have stumbled upon a rather ingenious concept: by paying homage to the movies some consider to be among the worst ever made, they effectively lower our expectations by several notches. Anything with a decent plot and some level of coherence is a bound to be a pleasant surprise.
Planet Terror
Grindhouse leads off with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie movie in the vein of seminal George Romero flicks like Dawn of the Dead.
The plot is straightforward enough: When a mysterious virus spreads through a small Texas town, turning its residents into oozing, ravenous zombies, a small cadre of uninfected citizens must fight their way through the hordes of undead in order to make it out alive.
Bloody, violent and unabashedly disgusting throughout, Planet Terror is a consistently entertaining, though ultimately forgettable, genre film. The body count is outrageously high, as zombies are dispatched in a myriad of creative – and increasingly gruesome – ways. Rodriguez maintains a stoutly tongue-in-cheek tone throughout while still managing to create a semblance of sympathy for the characters.
Rose McGowan’s standout performance as Cherry Darling, a spunky go-go dancer whose weapon of choice is a machine gun attached in place of her amputated right leg, (I know you’ve all seen the trailer) goes a long way toward establishing the actress as someone other than “that chick who used to be married to Marilyn Manson.”
Rodriguez inexplicably cast his pal Tarantino a minor role, and the wannabe actor proves once again to be a scenery-chewing distraction.
Planet Terror isn't as scary as 28 Days Later or as funny as Shaun of the Dead, but it's nonetheless a thoroughly enjoyable zombie romp.
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Death Proof
Any momentum established by Planet Terror, unfortunately, is quickly squandered by Death Proof, Tarantino's paean to car chase flicks like Gone in 60 Seconds (the original), Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. It features Kurt Russell as a sinister stuntman who preys upon unsuspecting young women, hunting them down with his souped-up muscle car.
In theory, it sounds great: take the hot rod genre and infuse it with a Tarantino sensibility. In reality, Death Proof is an exasperating debacle. I have little familiarity with the car chase flicks Tarantino so obviously admires, but I can bet they weren’t filled with endless sequences of inane dialogue, as Death Proof is. Tarantino subjects us to scene after scene of essentially the same thing: girls talking in a car, girls talking at a bar, girls talking at a restaurant. In all of the scenes, the dialogue sounds like a hacky writer's half-baked attempt to mimic Tarantino's work in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. And no amount of fancy camera work on the part of the director can make that interesting.
Russell turns in a fantastic performance, and there are some extraordinarily thrilling car chase sequences, but it’s not enough to compensate for Death Proof’s glaring flaws.
Of all the filmmakers working today, few receive the benefit of the doubt from critics more than Tarantino. Perhaps sympathetic to his earnest fanboy ethos, they’ll regularly excuse flaws in his films that would sink the efforts of less beloved directors. But the sycophants can’t save Tarantino this time. Don’t be surprised to hear reports of disappointed fans walking out of Death Proof in droves, well before the closing credits.
One more note: the fake trailers in between the movies are quite funny, but how difficult is it to make a funny fake trailer? I could go on YouTube right now and find half a dozen offerings that are funnier than the stuff featured in Grindhouse.
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Disagree? Email Tom Leupp and let em' have it! (tleupp@reelzchannel.com)
Grindhouse opens nationwide on April 6th.