Like If Scorsese and Coppola Got Together To Make a Double Feature Called "Italian"

Rating: 10/10 (9 April 2007)

Robert Rodriguez's feature, Planet Terror, has a script that is not purely the stuff of B-list cheese chock full of blood, goop, breasts, and guns. It is purely the recycling of that stuff from an eager fanatic's mind. While it's being set up, it's very intriguing, but like all Rodriguez films, its sustained plot later on is stale and routine. Also as always, his stories are held together by the single clever quality in them, which is the inventiveness of weaponry and scenes of violence, the main instance being namely in this case Rose McGowan's large machine gun attached to her body in place of a severed leg.
It has a wonderful atmosphere during its exposition. It switches around several characters in different settings, all fashioned with a surreal, exotic style. Simultaneously, Rodriguez very much keeps in the vein of grindhouse mimic. The screen is grainy throughout every frame and intermittently distorted and fumbled by an incompetent fantasy projectionist, and the amateurish spirit of the film is entirely appropriate, even if that quality bears no difference from the rest of Rodriguez's movies.
What is concerning me the most about Rodriguez's latter films is his increasingly blatant affinity for castration. It all started with Once Upon A Time In Mexico when Antonio Banderas crushed two men's genitals into a jelly with his bare hands. His next film, Sin City, contains three major castration scenes, not to mention several references and threats pertaining to groin violence throughout. Now in Grindhouse, there's a character who has a collection of testicles of the men who've betrayed, crossed, or failed him, complete with a scene that demonstrates this. This is a ridiculous, troublesome and largely disconcerting phase Rodriguez must promptly nip in the bud before it grows out of hand, as the subject seems to grow more prominent in each film, and he becomes known for this by a unanimously concerned audience. It doesn't help much when the dog violence occurs, after he seemingly gains our trust that he will not give into the dog casualty cliché.
Overall, Planet Terror is more Rodriguez fun-fluff with passion not so much driving the story and expression but the technical film-making itself, and not even in the language of it but in the fun to which Rodriguez always panders in the mere use of a blue screen, holding the camera himself, editing it himself, scoring it himself. This is perfect, however, for the theme and nostalgia of Grindhouse.
Tarantino's Death Proof is a different story. Death Proof is a work of more substance. The script is focused on the chemistry and relationships between its female friends, and it portrays these characters and their interactions with what Tarantino might seem to think of as realism. The story moves with an undoubted, forceful unpredictability. Its surprises are the stuff of real movies with a narrative manipulating decent thrills and reactions from its audience. This is all good, but is it the stuff of grindhouse cinema? Death Proof begins with the look and feel of an old 1970s camp flick, but gradually that fades and Tarantino cannot help or hide that it is a real movie. The reason for this is that honestly Tarantino is and always has been above "grindhouse" cinema and kung fu or Z-list car chase popcorn flicks. His movies, despite his desperate attempts to portray them as sendbacks to this class of cinema, have always resonated with the expression of a real and gifted filmmaker. I think that the reason the grain and inept projectionist gimmick in his cinematography here fades is because he cannot help but shoot and craft a film the best way he can to tell the story in the most effective possible way, not that he does but that is a goal he seems to indecisively try to reach.
Death Proof has a pretty terrific car chase, and when seen in the theater, as this film within the fabric of the outer movie Grindhouse is strictly intended to be. Does the chase begin as yet another "homage" of his to an earlier favorite? Yes. Is it gripping and are your feet pressing harder and harder against the floor as if you yourself are urgently trying to control the brakes and gas pedals of the cars in frustration caused by suspense? Yes.
The film's vital flaw, a summation of all of its smaller flaws, is that unfortunately both features are interchangeable. Rodriguez's Planet Terror has the theme and nostalgia but none of the wit and narrative passion, and Tarantino's Death Proof is virtually vice versa, just as one could say when comparing any other given pairing of movies by the two men. If Grindhouse's nostalgic statement were not so painstakingly clear based on the fake trailers and the two feature directors' previous work, then it would be lost in what's basically a double feature of two directors who are doing nothing more than what they always do. What both don't seem to realize (or maybe they don't care) is that they've made entire careers out of paying homage to grindhouse. For the fifteen years both directors have been working, they've not yet made truly personal work. They've stayed perpetually in the mindset of the ol' days of fun, bad no-brainer movies. The only difference is that Rodriguez doesn't seem to have any potential beyond that sort of film and Tarantino seems to fear making a movie that's entirely his own, perhaps because if he did, then he couldn't deflect criticism with justifications prepared by his uses of homage.
The highest points of the movie really are the trailers before and in between features. They are some of the most entertainment and hilarity you will ever get from going to a movie theater. They are what truly make you feel like you are in that fantasy world, where you really feel like you're in some old sleazeball movie house from generations ago.