Grindhouse Review or A Tale of Two Shitties

It was the best of films, it was the worst of films, it was a movie of action, it was an artless bore...

This weekend (on Easter day actually) I went to see the combined works of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The double feature, collectively dubbed Grindhouse, was supposed to showcase two shortish films (Planet Terror and Death Proof) from two of my favorite directors interspersed with fake trailers. As far as that goes, it succeeded.

But in more practical terms it gave us two examples of shitty, B-movies that should have both been immaculately good, fastidiously planned, A-list versions of B-movies. They should play up all the things we love about seeing a so-bad-it's-good movie in a crappy theater, and none of the things that we endure grudgingly. Unfortunately only Planet Terror manages to use missing reels, scratched film, and overexposed negatives to their fullest potential. And Death Proof... well... let's save that for later.

Planet Terror was certainly worth the price of my admission. It was probably even worth the 14 bucks I spent on popcorn and orange soda. And it may have been worth the 15 year old gang-bangers wandering in around halfway through, sitting down, talking loudly, then deciding to go try to score some weed and leaving. Rodriguez packed more action movie one-liners into the script than I would have expected it could handle, but it always works, and it's always funny. There's just something ridiculously satisfying about plot twists involving the hero being forced to escape zombies on a pocket bike. Not to mention the fact that those selfsame zombies tear Fergie apart in her first five minutes of screen time. Turns out, she really wasn't really as Fergilicious as adverstised.

Wonder Blog rating for Planet Terror: 9.4/10

Then come the second trailers between showings, all of which were better than Death Proof.

Wonder Blog rating for The Trailers (which deserve their own post... damn they were brilliant): 10/10

And then... slowly, came Death Proof. After roughly an hour and a half of zombies, explosions, and chicks with prosthetic legs made out of (working) machine guns we're treated to this stinky cinematic suppository. It starts out somewhat promising, with a replacement title screen for the (obviously) lost real one. But then we're subject to the most boring, painful, meaningless chick flick girl-talk for what felt like longer than the first movie.

And the fetishism! My god! After the fifth or sixth long, lingering shot of some girl's feet I turned to my cohorts and asked 'I forgot, did Tarantino direct this one?' I mean, I fully support his doing whatever turns him on, but let's move along with the movie, alright?

A few spoilers follow from this point so just skip to the ranking if you'd like to avoid them. But the girls we meet at the start of the movie are so painful to watch that I literally applauded their deaths. I could not have been happier when Kurt Russel drove his car over the face of one of the most annoying of their number. After he dispatches the first long winded, annoying car-load of women, he manages to find a second. These girls are perhaps even more annoying and I was greatly looking forward to their deaths. Unfortunately that's not how the movie went. I won't ruin the ending, but I will say it was weak, and that I'd really liked for them all to have died painfully, if for no other reason than that it's not really suspense if nothing bad actually happens.

Wonder Blog rating: 4.5/10

Overall I'd recommend seeing it. But if you have to duck out early, don't feel too bad about missing Death Proof. I'm seeing Grindhouse again this weekend and I doubt I'll stay for it. (Though Rosario Dawson looked lovely in it. So did Mary Elizabeth Winstead for that matter *rwrr*.)

Of course, you're welcome to agree with me. Feel free to do so below.

- Scott