Elevating exploitation flicks to an art-house level

Rating: 9/10 (6 April 2007)

Let's be clear about this. Grindhouse is crap.. pure, utter, enjoyable crap that will leave you laughing heartily, clapping, and looking at your watch to see how much longer the pain will last. All of which is the intended result, meaning that the directorial and writing tandem of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino hit their mark in spectacular fashion.
This is a movie where even the flaws are an homage to the genre of B-movie cinema trash, as much as is the gore, action, car chases, and crotch shots.
Clocking in at a little over three hours, Grindhouse is not a movie for those unfamiliar with the cinematic trash that was the mainstay of 70s repertory houses, paying the bills for theater owners and allowing them to schedule less profitable, higher class foreign imports by directors such as Ingmar Bergman.
Complete with deliberate continuity gaffs, dialog that alternates between the horrendously mundane and momentarily brilliant (which must have been a stretch for the normally sharp-penned Tarantino who is known for his snappy dialog), and "missing reels" jumping their respective film's story lines forward some 20 minutes in a second, Grindhouse has been designed from the ground up to entertain the B-movie-violence-loving film geek and test the patience of anyone else who doesn't fall into that category.
For those not in the know, Grindhouse consists of two separate movies, both with different leads but the same group of supporting actors, with bogus trailers prefacing each.
The first half, the Rodriguez-directed Planet Terror, tells the story of a chemical outbreak that turns the inhabitants of a remote Texas dust hole into flesh eating zombies, further spreading the contagion with each non-lethal bite. It features the scantily clad Rose McGowan as a stripper turned machine-gun-legged killing machine (don't ask, just go with it), and delivers the sardonic pleasure of watching Stacy Ferguson of the Black-Eyed Peas being turned into zombie lunch. The second installment, Death Proof, features Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike, the surprisingly suave yet chickenshit psycho who drives a black, structurally fortified, 1971 Chevy Nova and bites off more than he can chew when he encounters Kiwi stunt-woman Zoe Bell (playing herself) and three girlfriends out for a "joyride" in a white 1970 Dodge Challenger.
The latter film, which suffers deliberately from extended dialog scenes that serve as much to agonize the viewer as they do to provide plot info, is the superior of the two in that zombie movies are a dime a dozen, while tributes to gearhead films such as Richard C. Sarafian's 1971 film "Vanishing Point" are few and far between. Once Tarantino gets his fill torturing the viewer with his chatty roadhouse and diner sequences, and the film hits the open road, that's when things really start to "shake and bake". Like a nitro-fueled funny car, Death Proof delivers the goods in a white knuckle sequence in which Bell actually performed her own outrageously insane stunts  a sequence that will impart tremendous respect for the profession of stuntman/woman.
There was a time when B-movies were just that, exploitive cinematic crap that many of us loved for their unabashed no-holds-barred festival of nudity, gore and violence. The genre can now thank Tarantino and Rodriquez for elevating it to the level of art film.
Russ Meyer must be rolling over in his grave with joy.