Great fun but could have been better

Rating: 8/10 (9 April 2007)

I had great hopes for these movies and I was slightly disappointed perhaps because of the high expectations. It all begins with 60s/70s style theater messages to the audience "previews"/"feature presentation"/"restricted rating". The first preview is for "Machete" a great ultra-violent double-crossed hit-man on the run story featuring the meanest looking bad guy in Hollywood, Danny Trejo. And some naked babes. The first movie "Planet Terror" is quite your standard fare recent Zombie movie. It reminded me to some extent of Romero's Land of the Dead because it takes place at night and we have a gang of heroes. But Rodgriguez's movie is much more gory and splatterrific. The cast is made up by a bunch of familiar faces. Unfortunately Rose McGowan has the lead here, and while she looks nice dancing- although she doesn't strip naked- for the rest of the movie she looks like the bride of Frankenstein, partly because her all the work cosmetic surgeons have done on her face and with the wooden/machine gun leg she walks like someone out of a DEVO video. The story is OK, although we are introduced to too many people and there's an attempt to familiarize us with their lives to some extent. We could have easily done with a less characters. Despite the scratches added to the look of the film, aside from that, it looks contemporary and slick. Which is not a good thing. I'd like the coloring to have matched some older movies perhaps. The gore is great, there's some sleaze involving testicles for some reason, but where's the nudity? What follows are a preview for "Werewold Women of the SS" a goofy funny movie in the vein of the Ilsa/SS type directed by Rob Zombie. Then "Don't" which is more a mockery of previews of the 70's. Then a preview for "Thanksgiving" a twisted little trailer with a awesome but ridiculously deep voice-over and some great graphic violence. "Death Proof" is the weaker of the two movies here and features your standard Tarantino elements: ugly and trashy females, Venessa Ferlito being the only exception here, some funny ebonics talk, girlpower thematics, overlong semi-witty dialogue about nothing particularly interesting. The stars in this movie are the cars, a trinity of Mustang, Nova, and Challenger. Unfortunately, the last two don't fare too well. Kurt Russell gets a thankless role as the bad guy. Seriously, Quentin need to get some therapy to get over his daddy issues. There may have been a time when skinny chicks beating guys to death may have been cool, but thanks to Alias, the Decent, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, High Tension, etc. etc. the whole violent girly "hero" thing is getting seriously annoying. We get it Hollywood, you're trying to overcome your biblical patriarchal days by engineering a matriarchy. Enough already. In any case, "Death Proof" is made of 2 mostly unconnected episodes of Kurt Russells character going after a bunch of females with his death proof car. In the first episode at a bar, Kurt's Stuntman Mike character engages 3 females in conversation about his job, one of them, Rose McGowan, will end up taking a ride with him. She doesn't last long. At the same bar, 3 females we met earlier are having drinks with some guys. One of this girls was put up by her friends to give the first guy a lapdance who recites a poem. Mike does it but we don't know if he gets a lapdance due to missing reels in the film. The 3 girls leave the bar and Mike takes revenge on them. The second episode features 4 even uglier females who work in the film industry who end up taking a Dodge Challenger for a test-drive. 2 of the girls are super tough stunt-chicks, wouldn't you know, who end up performing some silly stunt on the Challenger. Out of nowhere, Mike re-appears to terrorize these girls as well. But this time around he's met his match. These girls are tough and mean and don't take no crap from a man, you know. But they don't hesitate to leave their girly female friend at the mercy of the hillbilly owner of the Challenger. What ever happens to her we don't know. The movie never bothers to tell. What saves this movie somewhat is the great car chases and some nice bare feet. After listening to these broads babbling for hours, we eventually get to hear nothing but the roaring of V8s, what a pleasure! Tarantino has to be the only director in Hollywood who finds women attractive and we get some nice shots of feet, legs and butts. But where's the nudity? These movies are supposed to take us back to the days, of cheap thrills, ultra violent blood soaked movies filled with nudity. I sure hope that the DVDs will have some more as it's known that the MPAA loves violence but hates naked women. I very much admire and appreciate the spirit in which Grindhouse was made. It just didn't go far enough. Too much is cosmetic here, the scratches and hair on the film. The coloring, the themes, the look, the misogyny- all should have been there as they were in the old days. These are still contemporary movies they are just made to look old. Tarantino gets in the way of himself here. His movies are too much of him, so whether they are supposed to be horror, action, drama, they are kinda the same. And Quentin, c'mon, you can hire the most gorgeous women in Hollywood, yet why do we keep getting these ugly hags? For someone who claims to be a black guy in a white man's body, the one thing you're missing in your afro-blood is good taste in women. To the Weinstein creeps, Eli and Quentin, and whoever else has some gonads in lalaland, please produce "Thanksgiving"- that could be the movie that these two should have been. I say, give us a Machete-Thanksgiving double feature in 08!