Leave after the trailers

Rating: 4/10 (18 May 2007)

The two movies-within-the-movie simply do not work together. The first film, the Rodriguez "Planet Terror," is terrific lively fun, and the action never lets up. It's the sort of thing a grindhouse director might actually have made if he'd had a bigger budget and a lot more talent than most of his peers. The trailers midway through are extremely funny and maintain just the right grindhouse tone. But the Tarantino film that follows is a dreadful, talky-talky-talky bore, a true endurance test that just goes on and on and on like some kind of Andy Kaufman stunt... until finally you get a few minutes of automobile collisions. The group of "heroines" are downright repulsive, unattractive, and masculine, and the theme of butch women beating the crap out of an evil male is -- well, more a product of Tarantino's personal fantasies, I think, than of the true grindhouse world.