Grindhouse

Kitchen sink

2007

Review: June 19, 2007

Director: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Freddy Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, Vanessa Ferlito

Yes, but bring multiple bumps, as it’s long.

THE SETUP:

Double-feature tribute to schlock movies.

DISCUSSION:

I had avoided seeing this, even though you’d think it would be the exact kind of thing I would rush out to see. But no, because I like movies that are unintentionally bad, and don’t like movies that are TRYING to be bad, plus I despise Quentin Tarantino, and let’s not forget that IT’S THREE HOURS. But then it flopped [which I was delighted by], and finally, once all the hype had deflated and blown away and the whole thing was just a bad memory and it was only playing in one theater and only at 8:15—only then was I in the right frame of mind to see it.

And—surprise!—I loved it. It was really fun. And now that I’ve seen it I have some theories as to why it flopped as hard as it did, but we’ll get to those after we’ve discussed both films.

We open with a fake trailer [there are four fake trailers by various directors] for a revenge movie called Machete. It’s cute. Then Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror begins. First we meet Rose MacGowan as a stripper named Cherry Darling who quits her job. Nearby is an army base, where Bruce Willis demands some serum or something, and produces a jar full of guys’ testicles. They are going to take the nuts off a scientist, but he shoots this thing, releasing this green gas into the atmosphere, which will soon begin turning everyone into zombies with nasty, boiling faces.

There’s also this nurse [Marley Shelton, who was a real spitfire], who is having an affair on her hot doctor husband, played by Josh Brolin. Blah, blah, blah, the corpses pile up at the hospital, the corpses get up and walk out, and eventually a full-on zombie apocalypse has begun.

It’s very funny because it is playing with the audience the whole time. It’s a little bit like the tone of Snakes on a Plane, which knew it was going to be funny and thus set about teasing and tickling audience expectations from the first frame. It’s also intentionally uber-gory, with all sorts of blisters and pus and blood spatters and stuff like that, which had the audience going in a fun way. Don’t miss the little homage to Body Double when the zombie is coming at one of our heroes with a saw and... the cord gets pulled out at the last second.

SPOILERS > > >
Toward the end Tarantino’s ugly mug shows up, as I suppose it must, as a soldier who is going to rape Cherry. There was some other movie—perhaps by Rodriguez—where Tarantino played a guy who threatened a female prisoner with torture and rape. The impression one gets is that he and Rodriguez think that women being tortured and raped is FUCKIN’ HILARIOUS! It’s ugly, but it’s what we’ve come to expect from Tarantino. One other surprise is that Cherry is not outfitted with her machine gun leg until quite late in the movie. I just expected it to come earlier, as that’s what all the ads are about. Oh, and there’s a scene where a guy plows a helicopter blade though a crowd of zombies, which is exactly what happens in 28 Weeks Later [and similar to something in the new Fantastic Four with the Silver Surfer]. Just coincidence? Or did one of them see or hear about it in time to add it to their film? We may never know.
< < < SPOILERS END

Toward the end, I was thinking “This is just like Death Race 2000, in that it has that sense of delightful immaturity, of wanting to throw in everything that’s even slightly “awesome,” and all for the pleasure of the audience. It’s super-gory, it’s fun, and it rushes along at a clip. And Rose MacGowan really is awesome. It was a great choice to open the movie with this one.

Then we have three more trailers. One is by Rob Zombie for Werewolves of the SS, and it’s not very good. Then there’s one for “Don’t!” which I believe is buy the Shaun of the Dead / Hot Fuzz guys and is typically sweet and charming. Then there’s one for a Halloween rip-off called Thanksgiving that is directed by Eli Roth and… well, one would be justified for hating him based on this trailer alone. In two minutes a woman gets a butcher knife up her cunt, a woman is served roasted like a turkey with a thermometer in her cunt, and a man is seen fucking a woman’s severed head. Hey, but it’s all in fun! Ladies, don’t you find this stuff just hilarious?

The Tarantino’s Death Proof begins. What I had read in one review is that Tarantino “cheats” by actually delivering a good movie, and almost all reviews found his effort to be far superior. Well, not me. But it did help me come up with a new alliterative phrase: Tarantino Tedious.

This movie is a “women’s revenge pic” about a guy, Stuntman Mike, played by Kurt Russell, who has rigged a car so that he can kill women with it but not get hurt himself. We open with these three friends, Butterfly, played by the beautiful and quite charming Vanessa Ferlito. She’s a little bit like a black, sassy Sandra Bullock. There’s also another one and their friend Jungle Julia, who is a popular local DJ. They all go out for drinks and shoot the shit for 20 minutes [or more, I wasn’t counting], crossing paths with Stuntman Mike in the process. Oh, and Tarantino has once more shoehorned himself into the narrative.

SPOILERS > > >
So first Mike gives Marley Shelton, the nurse from Planet Terror, a ride and kills her by driving erratically and slamming her all around the passenger seat. Then he turns his lights off and guns it full blast straight at the car with the three friends. He flares his lights just before impact, then hits them head-on, killing them all. We see the impact three times, seeing each die individually, including Julia's severed leg flying and the rear tire of Mike’s car grinding down Butterfly’s face. The whole thing is what Tarantino does best; you’re not sure how to feel about it, but it is undeniably powerful.

Then, after a brief interlude with Mike in the hospital [hurt but alive], we join our new characters. This includes Abby, played by still-radiant-despite-those-bangs Rosario Dawson, Final Destination 3 chick Mary Elizabeth Winstead [hereafter “FD3 chick”], British Zoe Bell [Uma’s stunt double on Kill Bill], and sassy braided African-American Kim. They have breakfast and yak and yak, drive around and yak and yak, then test drive some classic car like in Vanishing Point, which Zoe wants to do a stunt on. Did I mention that Zoe and Kim are stuntpeople? And of course, so is Stuntman Mike. This is a rare glimpse into the seldom-seen world of the stuntperson.

Zoe wants to ride around on the hood of the car while they speed down a country road. You know, of course, who is going to show up. And he does, terrorizing the women while Zoe is still on the hood.

So chase, chase, torment, torment, until finally they are able to stop and Zoe gets in the car. Then they decide that they want to go get revenge. So they find Mike and start smashing his car up. You will notice that Kim starts to appropriate male sexual power during this reversal, consistently calling him “bitch” and making many statements about how her rear-ending his car is akin to her forcing anal sex on him, including a statement about how she’s going to “bust a nut in his ass.” They finally catch him and kill him, the end.
< < < END SPOILERS

It was fine, but I don’t see what’s so great about it. This is 10, MAYBE 15 minutes of story stretched to 90 minutes with Tarantino dialogue. And that man DOES love the sound of his own dialogue. It seems like there’ a good 50 minutes here that is just talking. That’s fine, but I don’t see how that renders it any better than any other movie.

So it was a blast overall, despite leaving me with much fonder memories of Planet Terror than Death Proof. And afterward, I had a sense of why it would have failed at the box office. Rodriguez; I don’t think too many people really think about him as a filmmaker. He’s neither here nor there. But I think that Tarantino has burned too many viewers in the past with movies that seem made primarily for Tarantino’s pleasure, without seeming to have much of a care whether the audience enjoys them or not. It’s like “Okay, great, you’ve collected a bunch of references to old trashy movies that YOU and only you have seen, but why should I want to sit through that?” So when presented with this movie, which promised to be the fullest extension of his nothing-but-in-jokes-and-obscure-film-references ethos, and by the way, IS THREE HOURS LONG, I think most audiences, like myself, thought that more than likely they were looking at three hours of condescending tedium. Which is not to mention that it’s three hours long. So you’re looking at spending your entire night watching condescendingly tedious crap. I should also make note of the fact that it’s three hours long.

Which all turns out to be ironic and too bad because this is the most audience-inclusive movie I’ve seen come from Tarantino and his cronies. That said, I thought Tarantino’s Death Proof was the weakest part. In fact, I would have been fine to skip it entirely. It also suffers in retrospect, when you realize that there is almost no real story and he’s using it as another excuse to ram his oh-so-precious dialogue down your throat. So, Planet Terror is a fun ride that keeps you bouncing all the way through but becomes forgettable afterward, and Death Proof is amusing, then verges on tedious, then gets amusing again, but doesn’t hold up so well afterward.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Yes! But you should have gone to see it in the theater. It’s my fault.