At Slim's last-minute request, I came into
surprisingly-well-reviewed Grindhouse knowing next to nothing about it other than the premise of Rodriguez and Tarantino pastiching 1970s exploitation films. Which I thought was the point of "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "Kill Bill," but.
Perhaps I would have liked it more if I knew going in that it was an
actual three-hour double-feature, rather than two shorter movies packed together in normal movie-running time. Even with the clever gimmick of "missing reels" to avoid the problem of what Joe Bob Briggs once called "too much plot getting in the way of the story," the movies dragged far too much. And it almost seemed a message to Gregg Easterbrook: if you thought Kill Bill was violent, here's something that's
really violent.
There's ironically bad, and then there's just bad, and Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" is the latter. The zombie movie has been fully deconstructed in "28 Days Later," "Slither," and "Shaun of the Dead"; and 70s exploitation movie-making was satirized, well, at least as early as the 1977 "Kentucky Fried Movie." This is a movie for film critics and other film buffs, for Joe Bob Briggs fans (Amputations! Decapitations! Castrations! Exploding heads! Exploding cars! Exploding pus! Needle fu! Helicopter fu! Prosthetic-RPG fu! Tow-truck fu!), and apparently also for Slim, who did like it, but I always found Joe Bob Briggs's descriptions of the movies more fun than the movies themselves, and I was inclined to walk out.
Tarantino's "Death Proof" was more original than advertised: a strange and unique mash-up of the cheerleader/slasher/car-chase/feminist-revenge movie, but really a lenghty excuse for a several-minute set piece at the end of the movie showcasing Zoe Bell, Uma Thurman's stuntwoman in "Kill Bill," and some early 1970s muscle-cars. A subplot with a minor character in jeopardy when we last saw her is completely forgotten about. If you like Tarantino dialogue-about-quarter-pounders-and-other-trivia, there's dozens of minutes of it, including some lines that will likely have classic resonance later: "You know what happens to people with knives? They get shot!" At the back end of a double-feature, though, I didn't have much patience for the languid pace of the first hour of the movie.
