Hardcore moviegoers often fall into two camps: elitists, who love the medium but typically reserve their enjoyment for the most prestigious, highbrow films, and enthusiasts, those film buffs that are hopelessly, giddily obsessed with every facet of the cinema. Grindhouse theaters in the 1970s catered to the latter category of moviegoer, serving up sleazy double, triple and sometimes quadruple features of unrestrained mayhem and carnality.
Now, time has passed and grindhouse films have become skuzzy relics of a bygone era, as their anything-goes climate has been replaced by our current careful, risk-aversive era of ubiquitous sequels, remakes and CGI. But directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez aren't willing to let the pleasures of scrappy, low-budget B-movies be forgotten, and ""Grindhouse,"" their rollicking three-hour-plus ode to trash cinema, may very well be the most fun you ever have watching a movie in the theater.
In many ways, ""Grindhouse"" is the most self-reflexive mainstream movie since ""Adaptation""—its myriad bad splices, scratches, continuity errors and clumsy edits call frequent attention to themselves to immerse a contemporary audience into as close an authentic 1970s experience as possible. Before Rodriguez's gross-out zombie spectacular, ""Planet Terror,"" even commences, we get a hysterically funny fake trailer for ""Machete,"" which stars Danny Trejo as a double-crossed warrior out for revenge. (You're bound to be hearing people recite the tagline, ""They just fucked with the wrong Mexican,"" for weeks to come).
""Planet Terror"" is a bloody, intentionally schlocky valentine to the low-budget work of directors like Lucio Fulci (""Zombi 2"") and George A. Romero (""Night of the Living Dead""), complete with a catchy synth score right out of vintage John Carpenter (""Halloween"" and ""The Thing""). Characters include an ex-go-go dancer named Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), a tow truck driver with a past (Freddy Rodriguez), married doctors Dakota and Doc Block (Marley Shelton and Josh Brolin) and a handful of goofy police officers. The plot, which involves something about the release of chemicals that turn people into flesh-crawling, bloodthirsty zombies, is borderline incoherent, but that adds to the fun. For example, in the middle of McGowan and Rodriguez's cheesily steamy sex scene, the film burns up and we get a half-assed apology from ""theater management"" before getting thrust right into a major action scene that's already in progress.
This film is a hokey, deranged blast, aspiring only to keep riling its audience up, and it delivers the extreme goods that a cheapie horror thriller should always deliver.
Before Tarantino's half, ""Death Proof,"" we get three more hilarious faux trailers: Rob Zombie's ""Werewolf Women of the SS,"" Edgar Wright's ""Don't,"" and the best of the bunch, Eli Roth's grotesque parody of holiday-themed slasher flicks, ""Thanksgiving."" All three are suitably funny and crowd-pleasing, but Roth's deserves special mention, because in 2.5 minutes, he provides the two biggest gasp-inducing moments of the entire double feature (you probably can't imagine what the trailer's voiceover means by ""White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved."").
By this point, the grindhouse experience has been riffed upon and duplicated so skillfully that much of the audience will expect more of this sort of grungy cinematic horseplay. But then, inspired by such genre classics as ""Vanishing Point"" and ""Dirty Mary Crazy Larry,"" Tarantino's ""Death Proof"" comes roaring along, and this is where ""Grindhouse"" is most problematic. For geeks and enthusiasts, ""Death Proof"" is an absolute homerun and a worthy addition to Tarantino's stellar body of work, but those awaiting yet more nonstop bloodletting will be disappointed.
The film itself is deceptively simple, consisting of two sequences of extended buildup and then release. First, the oddly charming Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell in one of his best performances) tracks his first set of prey from nightspot to nightspot in Austin, Texas. His eventual victims include famous DJ Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) and her pot-loving friends. Almost half of ""Death Proof"" consists of the girls reciting vintage Tarantino dialogue about hardly anything—sex, scoring weed, great oldies songs—before they, in a split second, get demolished by Stuntman Mike's death-proof, souped-up 1970s muscle car. Then we start from scratch, and Tarantino introduces us to four new cool chicks (including Rosario Dawson) we know Stuntman Mike will be aiming his fenders at eventually.
But again, he makes us salivate in anticipation as they cleverly prattle about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, before unleashing a ferocious car chase that will go in the history books as one of the top three ever committed to celluloid (the biggest and most important reason? No CGI!). Tarantino's trump card is his casting of fearless stuntwoman Zoe Bell (who performed Uma Thurman's stunts in ""Kill Bill""), who, starring as herself, is central to one of the most dangerous, death-defying action sequences ever filmed. When the film morphs into a female revenge movie a la ""Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"" the conclusion is one of the most rousing, memorable finales in recent cinema.
Many will whine that ""Death Proof"" is boring, especially since it follows the gleefully disgusting, whiz-bang pyrotechnics of ""Planet Terror,"" but these folks will be missing the point. Robert Rodriguez is a craftsman more skilled in playful duplication than genuine artistry, so ""Planet Terror,"" being his most stylistically outlandish film yet, is ironically the best thing he's ever directed (Rose McGowan's machine gun leg is arguably the most iconic thing he's ever contributed to film).
Tarantino, on the other hand, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He plays by the established rules for the first half, shooting with scratchy film stock and tossing in bad editing flourishes (his missing reel also conveniently omits a sex scene that the projectionist probably pilfered for his own amusement), but once Stuntman Mike first strikes, Tarantino is done with homage. Tarantino is at his most subtle here; no longer do we get any scratches or jokey mistakes, because this is where he connects the grindhouse to contemporary cinema and creates something meaningful.
In its own underhanded way, ""Death Proof"" is a celebration of women, moving from the 1970s depiction of females as sex objects to a revised modern context in which they are equal to, if not more powerful than, the men.
Overall, ""Grindhouse"" is a fantastic, feverishly entertaining roller-coaster ride through cinema's past, but perhaps its biggest surprise is its relevance. This could easily have been a tedious imitation of bad movies for bad movies' sake, but Rodriguez and especially Tarantino, two serious film enthusiasts, have too much reverence and intelligence for that. Will audiences gobble up this risky endeavor, or will they be repelled and confused by the ecstatic trashiness of it all?
Either way, ""Grindhouse"" is nothing less than a rebuke of current cinema and a fierce challenge to step it up. If ""Planet Terror"" is the joke, ""Death Proof"" is the revisionist punchline: by making something so steeped in nostalgia and old-school techniques, Tarantino and Rodriguez have created a two-headed monster of a movie that is far better than anything else out there.
