'Grindhouse': Rodriguez Si, Tarantino No!

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 2007)

In this newest release, "Grindhouse," directors Robert Rodriguez ("Sin City") and Quentin Tarantino ("Resevior Dogs," "Pulp Fiction," "Natural Born Killers"), pay homage to cheap, B-grade 1970s films with what amounts to a double feature presentation.
The effort is a hit, and a miss.
Rodriguez's film, "Planet Terror," is a send up of those "aliens-try-to-take over the world" cheese-fests which populated rural drive-ins during that decade. It's like "Night of the Living Dead" meets the "Benny Hill Show" - on acid.
It's a nice homage (or parody or remake or whatever he's trying to do), however, and the bad acting, cheap sets, goofy script and poor lighting and camera work add to the nostalgic feel. The film even has scratches in the negative and missing reels for those who still do not get what's going on. It reminded me very much of the 1980's satire, "Amazon Women on the Moon."
"Planet Terror" begins on a dark night when stripper Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan, "The Black Dahlia") quits her job and then meets an old boyfriend, tow truck driver Wray (Freddie Rodriguez, "Poseiden," "Bobby"). Meanwhile, a group of soldiers, led by Bruce Willis, has released a deadly toxin into the air, causing everyone to turn into horribly-deformed zombies that look like extras from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video mixed with attendees at a John Merrick convention.
Sub-characters include Michael Biehn ("Terminator," "Tombstone") as a gruff cop; Josh Brolin ("The Dead Girl") and Marley Shelton ("American Dreamz") as feuding husband-and-wife doctors; Michael Parks (TV series "Along Came Bronson") as Sheriff Earl McGraw; and psychotic Mexican twin teenage babysitters, among others.
These folks team up to fight the ever-increasing undead horde, who although have survived an almost fatal contagion, are nevertheless vulnerable to a bullet. There's plenty of those flying about, too, and the gore factor in this segment reaches "Sin City" levels. This "movie" is a non-stop energy rush, however, and despite the goofy situations, is quite entertaining (even though the subplot concerning the little boy is unnerving and unnecessary).
Sadly, the same energy does not translate into Tarantino's work, "Death Proof," which tells of Stunt Man Mike (Kurt Russell) and his efforts to kill innocent young women with his car he has made so safe it's, well, death proof. He tests it out on four girls in the town of Austin, Texas, with great success; but against a quartet of others in Tennessee, things don't go as he planned.
Another thing that doesn't quite work is Tarantino's abysmal - almost glacial - pacing. It's a cross between "Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill" and "My Dinner With Andre," as he substitutes the frenzied action of the films he's trying to honor with long segments of the most banal and boring dialog ever written. Basically, it's eight of the most uninteresting women on Earth discussing men, sex, jobs, drugs and other minute details over and over again.
When Kurt Russell appears a second time, I was finally thankful for the segment's only likable character. No one could have expected Tarantino to continue Rodriguez's torrid pace, but "Death Proof" brought the entire production to a complete standstill; and not even a 10-minute car chase sequence at the end could save it. There's also no motivation as to why Russell's character wants to kill the women, but I won't quibble here.
As good as "Planet Terror" was, though, my favorite scenes in "Grindhouse" (which is a term for those one-screen cinemas of the era in which some movies would run for months at a time) were the coming attractions. Hilarious faux films such as "Machette" (a revenge/action/thriller with a Mexican hero), "Werewolf Women of the SS" and slasher flicks, "Don't" and "Thanksgiving," had the authentic feel of those grade-Z pictures anyone who grew up in that era paid money to see.
If only Tarantino had expanded any one of these premises instead of the dull and vapid "Death Proof," I could have completely enjoyed the final 90-minutes of this three-hour-plus experience.