Surprisingly Lame

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2007)

I well remember the era of the grind house because I lived through the tail end of it.My father would take my brothers and myself to see the latest double feature and sometimes triple feature low-budget film offerings during the late seventies.The films were fun and the audience was even more amusing.I think Grindhouse seems to have created the experience with this feature film complete with trailers. I won't go deeply into why this film seemed to leave me feeling somewhat shortchanged.
The first film was the better of the two.Planet Terror would actually have made a good stand-alone feature with an additional subplot.The over the top humor played it straight and made it even more amusing.Robert Rodriguez is lesser known than Quenton Tarantino but I suspect he has the lion's share of the talent at least in this film. The second feature was insufferable.I actually found myself yawning during the exposition in Death Proof.Quentin Tarantino really came up short in this one.The chick posse dialog just drove me up the wall.This slowed down the whole experience and definitely worked against my overall rating of this feature within the feature..
But to be fair many double features were uneven in quality.During the eighties I would go to the Times Square row of theaters and watch double and triple features and the experience would be pretty much how I felt during Grindhouse.Perhaps this is the hidden genius of these two filmmakers.