shameful box office response - and sort of deservedly so

Rating: 7/10 (28 May 2007)

The failure of Grindhouse at the US Box Office is both shameful and deserved. On the one hand it includes Tarantino's scintillating, genre-transcending maniac murderer flick Death Proof. But it is bogged down by the inclusion of Robert Rodriguez' proto-turkey Planet Terror, and the eventual three-plus hour runtime, for what was supposed to be a light-hearted cinematic romp, kept audiences away.
The perceived "failure" of Kill Bill as two ninety-minute features is probably what led the Weinsteins to believe that Grindhouse, as a three-plus hour release, was a good decision. But three-plus hour time commitments are something an audience is only going to make if they are certain that the bulk of time sitting still is going to be edge-of-the-seat. And for all of it's good things, including Eli Roth's devastatingly funny faux-preview for THANKSGIVING, there is not enough edge-of-the-seat thrills to keep the butt from getting sore. They come, but it is a long wait.
The primary fault here is Rodriguez' side of the double feature. It is not to say that Planet Terror is out and out a bad movie - it's just not particularly good. There are some nice performances in this send-up of the Romero zombie flicks, and the script certainly hits every genre convention and includes some very funny dialog, but the whole thing feels like a refried mishmash with a very pat ending. The high point would be Rose McGowan's performance as Cherry Darling. Ms. McGowan is a stunning woman and gets the bulk of the best lines. Even after losing a limb - and part of my reaction to Grindhouse' poor box office has to do with this - she still manages to remain attractive. The missing limb, and what it has been replaced with, remain an ongoing visual joke the filmmakers cleverly use. But on the whole, even at 90 minutes the film feels long. It is not good enough to make a person want to endure three hours to see it, and by the time Tarantino's film rolls around, audiences will have become restless.
I believe that part of the poor box office reaction was due to using shots of Miss McGowan with a gun attached to her stump as a publicity vehicle. Amputee women are just not attractive, and it was a waste of Miss McGowan's formidable beauty to show her deformed. People coming to a Rose McGowan movie are partially attracted by her looks (Miss McGowan also appears in the Tarantino feature, and seeing her with blonde hair makes it apparent that much of her considerable appeal is the Snow White aspect she brings to the table, with alabaster skin, red lips, and luscious dark locks).
Although Planet Terror was a decent, if not particularly thrilling, short feature, Tarantino's DEATH PROOF truly does transcend its genre. Tarantino's film has an odd structure - the only thing I can think of that is similar would be PSYCHO - wherein the first forty minutes or so are spent developing characters as protagonists who are shockingly, and abruptly, killed off. Following this, a new set of characters is introduced, and the killer, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell in a performance that transcends his career), begins to stalk them. A great deal of time is spent developing these characters as well. But when the killer strikes, what starts as an incredibly frightening and adrenal scene turns into one of the most rousing finales in years. Released on its own, with a few of the fake previews attached (especially THANKSGIVING) this movie would be one of the best of the year. The problem is that these well earned, skillfully made thrills show up past the two and a half hour point of GRINDHOUSE, by which time audiences will have been somewhat numbed.
Tarantino's skill, almost without peer, as a writer of crackling dialog shows up in Death Proof. The first group of girls, led by the remarkably lovely Sydney Poitier as Jungle Julia and Vanessa Ferlito as the petulant "Butterfly", come across as sexy, relaxed, and real, and their abrupt exit from the flick is shocking. The appearance of the second group of girl victims, with Rosario Dawson as a makeup girl and stunt-person Zoe Bell as herself, at first is something of a drag. So much time and energy had been invested into drawing Jungle Julia and her galpals as real people that it felt like a cheat that we were going to have to go through that all over again. In the hands of a lesser writer, the film would have died then and there, but Tarantino creates characters with enough richness to keep us interested even as they go off on their own, somewhat protracted and risky adventures leading up to the attack by Stuntman Mike. At this point, this second group of girls come into their own. Initially Stuntman Mike has them in a very precarious position, partially due to Zoe's own, somewhat singular recklessness, but eventually they get the tables turned. Without giving too much away, if you are going to commit vehicular homicide, Bell, Dawson and Tracie Thom's Kim are probably the worst women in the world you could try to do it to. Stuntman Mike receives one of the most deserved comeuppances of any movie bad guy in recent memory.
At this point the Weinsteins are talking about releasing Death Proof in a longer version in Europe. If successful, they might release only Death Proof in the US. This is the version I would see. Although Planet Terror is not a bad film per se, it is not worth sitting through to see Death Proof - think of having to sit through SLITHER to see a better movie after it. It's a shame the movie sank at the box office, but not undeserved.