the bad-ass extravaganza of the year; B-movie heaven if there ever was

Rating: 10/10 (6 April 2007)

Ah, Grindhouse movies, loaded for bear with the sickest garbage and clichéd to hell; hell, by the way, not to be taken for granted. The films and trailers presented are half-vomitoriums and half-absurd white-knuckle thrill-rides, where genre is taken apart like scissors on a stretch-Armstrong doll with all of the gooey effluence gushing away on the screen. And unlike some who've already seen the film, I'm not totally certain yet (least on a first-viewing) of which feature I liked/responded to more. They're both imperfect movies, but naturally so, and there's stuff in both that can be criticized for (i.e. Planet Terror goes too far and has dialog written as if by a guy in prison, and Death Proof is maybe too much like a Tarantino movie to really squeeze into the grindhouse mold). Yet on the terms that the filmmakers go for, they totally accomplish ten-fold. It's also just an extreme load of fun and excitement, with the kind of disturbing material that is unequivocally, hysterically funny.
Planet Terror is, in some ways, an even more f***ed up horror-show circus of violence and explosions and massive-gun-fire/death-counts and catch phrases than From Dusk Till Dawn was. It certainly marks another high-point for Rodriguez as someone who takes precedence for shocks and wild tricks of the visual medium than "interesting" dialog. In this case, Planet Terror revels in the cut-outs from past low-grade genre drek, and it works terrifically in the realm of the premise: noxious gas unleashed on a small town that sparks up "infected" people by the dozens-to-later-hundreds of zombie-esquire folk after a stripper, a rogue, law-enforcement folk, doctors, and a couple of babysitter sisters. It's almost a case for how some things- like WRETCHED violence and gore and multiple casualties and excess to a T- won't get an NC-17. Rodriguez also wisely uses two courses of action.
First is to make all of these vicious special fx all the more gleeful in the debauchery in its humor- not just the popping sores on the faces, or various limbs affected, but the "did they actually do that" moments, (Tarantino's genital area, the wrists of McGraw's doctor daughter), and to wonderfully set-up the look of the Grindhouse picture, where scratches are common as hell, a reel will go missing once in a while (ironically right during or before a hot sex scene), and almost tearing at the seams. This and Machete, his much-anticipated vehicle for the great character actor Danny Trejo, demonstrate Rodriguez's real gifts, and the actors he puts on display (from Cheech to Michael Biehn to surprisingly Rosa McGowan) are completely, hilariously unconscious of the recklessness of schlock like this. In very short, a gas from start to finish, with a nice touch of Carpenter-music (John I mean).
In the middle of the two films, by the way, are at least three whacked-out trailers as sort of special guests of Rodriguez and Tarantino's. Far more funnier and audaciously outrageous than the "normal" trailers, where Zombie's Werewolves of the SS giving Nicolas Cage his finest moment in film in many years, Wright's DON'T! a fantastic play on a cliché-by-title, and Thanksgiving being maybe the best, most shameless work Eli Roth has done yet (where else am I going to see a turkey get...well, maybe I've already said too much, aside from the greatest line ever: "White meat or dark meat, they'll both be carved!"). There's the movie-geek in all of us that would wish that all of these movie will someday be made into features, though part of the charm, if one could describe, is that they won't.
Tarantino, meanwhile, has something of a totally different route to go on here, which is all relative: Rodriguez, after all, is the first part of a double-billing, and as such makes his with much greater abandon for standards of good taste or common sense, yet is also not completely as strong because of its sort of badness (albeit goodness too). Tarantino is, more appropriately, the second half and not-quite main attraction, even if his might seem like more of a tame and conventional effort when compared to Planet Terror and the incredible trailers. It's an homage to the wild road-chase movies of the early 70s, where Vanishing Point gets a huge nod and Kurt Russell gets the brightest note to a career now overloaded with kids movies. His character, Stuntman Mike, is a wickedly fun masochist who's got attitude by leaps and bounds, and quite the bad-ass car. He doesn't contend with some ladies from the stunt-department of a movie-set, however, where a cat-and-mouse game ensues.
And a damn fine game indeed; the car chases in Death Proof should maybe even appeal to those who usually don't take to car chases too highly, namely because Tarantino's got a satirist's eye always at work somehow in the material. The danger comes when it leans towards being talky, as QT tends to do, and one shot in a diner brings Reservoir Dogs very much into mind. But it's also of interest that Tarantino has actually made a very solid action thriller, one that goes one or two steps further than the common road-movie of the old times went, with the craziness there and sort of complimenting Tarantino's clever direction, tough women, and good old rock & roll.
So gear up in your dirty seat, if you can find one, with a bunch of friends in a crowded theater, and make sure not to miss the little animated intros to the "parental advisory" warning before each movie. It's the movie 'event' of the year, particularly for fans of unrepentant action and gruesome carnage.