One of Rodriguez's best and one of Tarantino's weakest is still great

Rating: 9/10 (21 October 2017)

I originally saw this in the theater and loved it! I was too young to have seen this sort of double feature this film is a loving homage to, but I did grow up watching a ton of these sorts of exploitation films on VHS, which re-watching this film brought back those video store memories. Maybe for a home video release of this double feature they should have added some cheesy Vestron Video opening and replaced the missing reels and burnouts with VHS tape splices and tracking errors. Or maybe that's another Rodriguez/Tarantino film for another day? I'd recently watched both of these films separately and gave "Planet Terror" ***** and "Death Proof" ***1/2. "Gindhouse" in it's original theatrical presentation as a double feature, complete with mock trailers for fictional movies, falls somewhere in between. Edgar Wright's "Don't" trailer is the best. It looks most like it was a real movie and has a hilariously coda at the end, but a close runner-up is Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving" as a very funny send up of holiday themed slasher films (i.e. "Halloween," "Mother's Day," "April Fool's Day," "Black Christmas," etc), but Rodriguez's "Machete" trailer and Rob Zombie's "Werewolf Women of the SS" are also hilarious send ups of various exploitation film sub-genres. I also greatly appreciated the faux grain in the "Grindhouse" version over the cleaned up individual releases. As to the merits of the two films on their own, see my previous individual reviews.