Good, but could have been better

Rating: 8/10 (20 April 2007)

Tarantino does not get the joke.
Robert Rodriguez gets the joke. Planet Terror is an incredibly gory, off the wall parody of exploitation action/horror movies, complete with all the right characters, a knowingly silly script, intentionally stupid dialog, and ridiculous amounts of violence. Planet Terror is a gory comedy, with some horror elements, in the same spirit of Bad Taste, Evil Dead 2, and Scream. It's not a very good movie, but it was never meant to be. That's the joke.
Tarantino didn't get the joke. Tarantino went ahead and instead made an actual exploitation movie. Unlike Planet Terror, Tarantino plays it completely straight faced, and besides a few editing jokes near the beginning, there really isn't anything in the movie that differentiates it from your normal summer slasher material.
This being said, Death Proof is a better movie than Planet Terror. It's better made, executed, and the last 20 minutes are pure dynamite! It just isn't funny.
It's not a parody of exploitation movies, it IS an exploitation movie, which is fine, but it doesn't fit with anything in Grindhouse up to then. Imagine going to see Friday the 13th and the last half of the movie is Jason gaining intelligence and having to come to terms with the crimes he's committed through painful introspection.
Who the hell wants to see that? Either you want to see a horror comedy or you want to see a regular horror movie, and in either case you certainly don't want to watch it for over three hours.
Grindhouse would have been a 9, rather than an 8, if they were either released separately (you could have even had a 'which movie is better, you decide' advertising campaign), or cut about 45 minutes out of the entire thing (or 22.5 minutes a movie). There are plenty of disgusting hospital scenes in Planet Terror and useless conversations in Death Proof that all belong on the cutting room floor.
This never would of happened of course, for the same reason the new King Kong wasn't edited even though it badly needed it: they were ego movies. That isn't to say they were bad movies. They just could have been so much better.