Grindhouse :: Wessex Scene Online

Grindhouse

The sleaze-filled saga of an exploitation double feature.

25th June 2008
Phil Reynolds

About this film

Title	Grindhouse
Director	Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Release Date	6 April 2007
Certificate
Genres	Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Our Rating	3.5/5.0
Shown at Union Films Tuesday 15th April 2008 10:00pm

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Oct 09 - Film Review: Inglourious Basterds
Nov 09 - Zombieland
May 07 - 28 Weeks Later
Jun 08 - Speed Racer
Jun 10 - Nightmare on Elm Street

More by Phil Reynolds

Jan 08 - Bee Movie
Oct 07 - Run Fat Boy, Run

Grindhouse trailer

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino Team up for some retro gruesome gore.

There comes a point half way through Planet Terror, the first of the Grindhouse double feature, where an amputee go go dancer with recently attached wooden leg, is rescued by her ninja, knife wielding ex-lover from hordes of mutant zombies. ‘This is ridiculous!’ She shouts. Ridiculous indeed. But you’ll be hard pressed to find a cinematic experience more stupid, more daring, or more enjoyable than this.

A ‘cinematic experience’ is truly what Grindhouse is. For those who missed Quentin Tarantino’s typically hyperactive promotional tour to promote his much maligned movie series at the end of 2007, a history lesson: Grindhouse is the collaboration between cinema’s biggest geeks, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. In typically postmodern fashion, the film is a pastiche of the old grindhouse features of the seventies, where audiences were treated to two absurd, hyper-violent, blood splattered features, sandwiched between adverts for upcoming attractions.

From the moment the lights go down, Tarantino and Rodriguez inject viewers so completely into the grindhouse experience that it’s difficult to know where the modern world ends. Scratchy, misspelt title cards offer ‘prevues of coming attractions’ and in the place of the omnipresent Indiana Jones: And the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Dark Knight trailers, viewers are treated to a trailer for the imaginary Machete, a superbly violent, knowingly idiotic CIA action movie, which comes dangerously close to self parody for Rodriguez and his El Mariachi series.

These short trailers are technically perfect. The scratchy cameras, the quick, poorly framed cuts that prevent anyone realising that Edgar Wright’s contribution is filled with loathsome English actors. Even the deep, unusually verbose James Earl Jones imitation voiceovers will be familiar to anyone who has seen trailers for late sixties, early seventies films like The Omen or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Rodriguez and Tarantino know their subject unnervingly well. And by the time Machete has…well…macheted his way through an entire cast of extras in the trailer’s meagre run time, viewers are neatly introduced to the baffling world of Grindhouse.

Falling some way between a modern action adventure, a zombie horror film, and a trashy Steven King novel, Planet Terror – Robert Rodriguez’s contribution to the Grindhouse experience is brilliantly bizarre. Strung together in the language of film cliché, Planet Terror introduces us to go go dancers, Texan barbeque restaurant owners, a local sheriff and a psychotic doctor and his lesbian wife as they all deal with the outbreak of a biological weapon that mutates the backwater town into a nation of swollen faced creatures.

For the director, gritty, realistic storytelling and character motivation go out the window. Vast plot gullies are elegantly leapt, or casually ignored as the go go dancer has her leg amputated and replaced with a high powered machine gun, and Osama Bin Laden is hunted down and unceremoniously killed.

In the place of common sense, Rodriguez ramps up the gore. The red stuff fountains out of every flesh wound, and people are quite casually torn in half and decapitated as the camera gazes on. It’s something of a shock to a modern audience, who breathlessly wait for the respectful cuts that we as cinemagoers have come to expect when a knife hovers menacingly over an unsuspecting victim. A cut that never comes, thanks to Tarantino and Rodriguez’s worrying verisimilitude.

Yet, for a film that spreads the ketchup like a bad burger bar, Planet Terror remains strangely chaste when it comes to sex. After a credit sequence in which audiences are treated to a pole dance, the film quickly covers up – indulging in the most ridiculous levels of horror and gore, but cutting playfully to a ‘missing reel’ as the female lead gets busy with her mysterious ninja lover. Perhaps this is another playful, ironic comment on the state of American self censorship in the seventies, but it feels a disappointingly restrained for a film that has so much fun in breaking every other taboo of good taste.

Tarantino’s feature, Death Proof, which arrives after trailers for Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S and the brilliantly horrific Thanksgiving, places viewers on more familiar ground. Tarantino’s postmodern, reference-heavy filmmaking style lends itself a little better to the exploitation movie subgenre.

However, that isn’t to say that Tarantino’s plot is any less ridiculous than Planet Terror. Death Proof tells the story of Stunt Man Mike, a crazed ex stuntman, who, for no readily apparent reason, loves to kill young women by smashing his ‘death proof’ car into things, with them in the unprotected passenger seat. However, after offing one young woman, he sets his sights on a carful of girls, in whom he just may have met his match.

Such a slim conceit is padded by a good forty five minutes of Tarantino’s trademark dialogue, where characters seem happy to discuss everything except the plot of the film. Unlike the brief and entertaining banter between Jules and Vic in Pulp Fiction or the debate about tipping at Reservoir Dogs’ opening, here Tarantino seems to believe that all women talk about is men and sleeping with men. Worse still, his black female lead’s dialogue is only a little shy of flagrantly racist.

In a film with such a brief run time, the endless patter of Tarantino’s conversation quickly drags, and it isn’t until the final car chase that the film livens. And what a chase it is. We are spoilt with such beautiful, long pans of the duelling cars as they attempt to ram one another off the road that they make even The Matrix Reloaded blush. There are no need for fast cuts, or strange camera angles to artificially inject tension into the scene, instead, in a rare case of Tarantino playing it straight, he allows the balletic performances of the cars to leave viewers on the edges of their seats.

Individually, neither Death Proof nor Planet Terror are spectacular entries, and would probably disappoint on DVD. Instead, the real pleasure of these films is seeing them nestled between each other, and the brilliantly funny trailers. Taken together, the Grindhouse Experience – a whopping three hours of film lunacy, is rare magic. A pair of films that revel so deeply in their own idiocy that you can’t help but love them.