Hits like a Spiked Hammer to the Joy Bone

Rating: 10/10 (8 April 2007)

Grindhouse reviewed by Samuel Osborn
To see Grindhouse is to agree to a day spent at the movies. Me and my two movie-going compadres returned from the 192 minute double-feature and decided promptly upon three-hour naps. Between the film and the effect it has on your body, seeing Grindhouse is a full day excursion. So now I'm wiping the sleep from my eyes, hunched over the laptop keyboard racking my brain for adjectives to explain this whackjob picture. For now let's just keep things simple and say Grindhouse is, if nothing else, a damn fine way to spend a day.
It's only sensible to discuss the pictures separately since each is a standalone, full-length feature of a different ilk. To those who've somehow avoided The Weinstein Company's marketing blitz to promote this thing, Grindhouse is double-feature throwback to the seventies theatres of the same name. A person would buy one ticket and see two cheap, gory, exploitative romps in a row, divided only by a round of commercials and previews for coming attractions. And so indie-film legends Robert Rodriguez (The El Mariachi series, Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) have teamed up to each make their own version of a typical entry into the grindhouse circuit, complete with missing reels, overlapping dialogue, phony commercials, and fake previews authored by directors Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects), Eli Roth (Hostel), and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).
Rodriguez's zombie picture, Planet Terror, hugs to the grindhouse tradition tighter than Tarantino's entry. It runs on a standard zombie storyline and works like a Land of the Dead that has enough humor to not take itself seriously. Bruce Willis has a cameo as the surprise villain, cast for the sole reason of looking irrationally badass, with other main players being Freddy Rodriguez as the frowning, muscular hero and Rose McGowan who most will recognize from the film's ads as "the chick with an effing gun for a leg." The film plays as well as any Rodriguez picture, but could stand to have a sizeable chunk removed. Mr. Rodriguez seems attuned, like Tim Burton and The Coen Brothers, to making films that are goodbut only good. Not sharpened up enough to write something truly great, Rodriguez tends to put out solid pictures that leave something to be desired. In a different situation this would hardly go noticed, but up against Tarantino's Death Proof, Planet Terror is plainly inferior.
Of course, Tarantino doesn't exactly play by the rules. Though Death Proof occasionally remembers its grindhouse intentions, throwing in a stray missing reel and poorly edited bit here and there, Tarantino gets wrapped up in all his glowing indulgences at every turn. Part slasher film, part fictionalized episode of "Jackass," and part road-rage fantasy, Death Proof is a happily uneven mess of giddy amusement. It's brilliant, but impossibly so. By its end, any semblance of a story has dissolved into an empty husk of fun; like taking a straight-shot of entertainment.
There was a story to begin with, involving Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) stalking women to destroy beneath his "death proof" carwhich replaces the knife as the Slasher film's weapon of choice. But after being on the backend of several rounds of Tarantino's absurd talent for writing dialogue, it's time to switch gears into car chase mode. The much-hyped chase--which Tarantino has reported hoping to be in the top three car-chases of all timesheds all progression of its previous story to make way for another straight-shot of adrenaline to the face. But again, maybe Tarantino's cheating. Without giving away the twist, there's an added element to the segment that makes the chase not only fast, but also tense enough to make your palms bleed sweat. And when this extended scene ends in all its brutal majesty, Death Proof is over.
To be honest, grindhouse theatres came and went before my time. But what Tarantino and Rodriguez have assembled, in all its previews, features, and commercials, is a strange device for extreme pleasure. The films shouldn't logically work, especially Tarantino's, but they do, and furiously so. It hits like a spiked hammer to the joy bone and leaves you on a high. And like any true experience at the movies, that high doesn't fade for the rest of the day.
Samuel Osborn