GRINDHOUSE (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007) ***

Rating: 6/10 (14 April 2007)

Yesterday's whining about missing out on these discussions proved premature, because I eventually managed to get hold of a DivX copy of the film in a matter of hours! It may not be the ideal medium to fully appreciate the GRINDHOUSE experience  especially in view of the cropped picture and muffled audio  but, for the moment, it was enough to tide me over; at least, I was able to get an inkling of what the film is like since, as I said before, there's no announced local release date as yet.
Anyway, I have to say that on the whole I was underwhelmed by it all: like Joe Karlosi, individually I'd rate the Rodriguez segment **1/2 and Tarantino's ***. Still, I'm sure it's better to watch them as a double-feature because neither of the two parts really add up to much on their own. After all, that is the whole nostalgic spirit of grindhouse it is trying to celebrate complete with cheesy trailers, two 90 minute B-movies back-to-back, scratched prints, audio drop-outs, missing reels, etc. I have only watched a handful of grindhouse movies myself  4 of which were introduced by Tarantino himself (together with Joe Dante) during a marathon midnight screening at the 2004 Venice Film Festival.
To get to the film(s) proper now: I've watched little of Robert Rodriguez's movies so far and I wasn't that much taken by them and his "Planet Terror" is an extremely gory zombie flick which, as mindlessly enjoyable as it is while it's on, essentially brings nothing new to the table. It's as much a virtual retread of his own FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996) as a nod to the zombie films of George Romero, Lucio Fulci et al. The cast is a mix of young actors and grindhouse/action-movie veterans: Rose McGowan is ideally cast as the heroine who finds inspired use for her leg when it's amputated after being bitten off and Marley Shelton leaves a good impression as a harassed needle-sporting doctor  but then Freddy Rodriguez is a non-entity as McGowan's ex-boyfriend; the rest include Josh Brolin as Shelton's crazed surgeon husband, Tom Savini as a distraught cop, Michael Biehn as his superior, Jeff Fahey as a bartender, Michael Parks (reprising his sheriff role from the KILL BILL [2003/4] films!), Bruce Willis as a shady military official and Tarantino himself (who keeps inflicting his imaginary thespian skills on moviegoers despite the resulting sabotage of his appearances) as an obnoxious orderly of Willis'so his stomach-turning demise was particularly welcome!
Quentin "Look, I'm an artist, alright" Tarantino's "Death Proof" is potentially intriguing: while Rodriguez's aim seems to have been to merely replicate the dumb thrills of typical grindhouse efforts, Tarantino's segment  frustrating though it is  comes off more like a reflection on this particular style of film-making (and the road movie/car chase variety in particular), with little plot and a lot of mood-setting. But, unfortunately, Tarantino is too much in love with his own dialogue and there are reams of utterly uninteresting chick chatter between the two sets of girls which makes for a rather dull ride (no pun intended) and I pretty much gave up on listening to the actual banter after vainly trying to sort out any substance from all the expletives! Some of the girls (Vanessa Ferlito and Sydney Tamiia Poitier) look good, thankfully, but I have to ask what they were doing mouthing off would-be hip references to cult 'car' films of the 1970s or wondering what turn Pete Townshend's career would have taken had he left The Who?! All of which makes Tarantino's claims that "Death Proof" contains his best dialogue exchanges ever and that he is in the same league as Preston Sturges and Mark Twain as a writer ludicrously egomaniacal. Luckily, Kurt Russell is on hand to lend some much-needed gravitas to the proceedings; interestingly, his character goes through quite a surprising change throughout the course of "Death Proof" (and I agree wholeheartedly with Michael Elliott that the two halves of this section actually happened in reverse). However, where this segment really scores is in the action sequences  alternately shocking (the repeated collision sequence and McGowan's vicious murder), thrilling (the car chase) and crowd-pleasing (Russell's come-uppance) rather than merely pure slam-bang as in "Planet Terror" (in spite of all its purposeful political incorrectness) - which really elevates Tarantino's piece above that of Rodriguez. Having said that, it's still not quite up to the level of his earlier work (for instance, the KILL BILL saga  which is the closest to it in feel and approach  is much better) and I'd say this is Tarantino's weakest effort to date.
In conclusion, another head-scratcher for me was that, in spite of all the admirable effort (mentioned above) on the part of the film-makers to replicate the grindhouse 'feel', the stories themselves were then set in modern-day America (cue the needlessly regular use of CGI effects in Rodriguez's section and that of mobile phones in Tarantino's) which, for me, rather defeated the purpose. The eclectic bunch of trailers (contributed by Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie and Rodriguez himself) are campy fun and an inspired addition to this decidedly mixed bag.