Sporting tight leather booty shorts, soaked in blood and roaring at 9,000 RPM, ‘70s exploitation films appeal to humanity’s basest of desires and all the better for it. With Grindhouse, a double feature ode to trash cinema complete with fake (and hilarious) movie trailers, directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez try to rekindle America’s passion for the drive-in experience, missing reels and all.
The films themselves brew up en ough salacity and wanton violence to satisfy fans of even the most sensational B-movies but not without hitting a few speed bumps along the way.
The first of the two features, Robert Rodriquez’s Planet Terror, is set in a small Texas town facing an epidemic of puss-faced zombies. Go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) reunites with her drifter ex-boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez), whose martial arts prowess and lightning-quick pistol skills have earned him the nickname “El Rey.” Along with a motley cadre of grease monkeys and stuffy suburbanites, they are forced to engage in man-to-zombie combat or surrender to the same fate as the drooling humanoids.
Planet Terror indulges in the absurdly unrealistic displays of gore that one expects from a shoot-‘em-up video game, and often comes off as such. Limbs fly, guts spill and “El Rey,” like a 12-year-old who’s properly mastered his joystick, never misses.
In its attempts to pack every moment with the sensational (see Cherry’s machine-gun leg), Terror paradoxically fails to surprise. The character relationships are less-than-dynamic and the linear plotline is wholly predictable. “El Rey” wins back Cherry with his steely resolve, and Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) becomes the ruthless killer that we all knew was hiding under her form-fitting white jacket. These flaws would be par for the course if it hadn’t been for the ante-upping zombie films of recent memory. Where 28 Days Later widened the genre’s apocalyptic scope and Shaun of the Dead injected it with a distinctly British wit, Terror offers nothing new to the zombie thriller formula and stands as a good, but not great addition.
Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof fares significantly better. The plot centers on the duplicitous persona of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a professional stunt car driver who revs his motor by stalking beautiful women and executing them demolition derby-style with his muscular ’71 Chevy Nova. The film is unabashedly nostalgic for the good ol’ days of CGI-free filmmaking, when a driver’s skill, not computer wizardry, determined the wow-factor of an action scene.
Though decidedly more slow-going than Planet Terror, Death Proof’s pace only really lags once due to some uncharacteristically weak dialogue. Tarantino has demonstrated his nearly unparalleled gift for dialogue in the past, most memorably with illuminating discussions about the international implications of McDonald’s Quarter Pounder or Madonna’s non-virgin lyrical intent with “Like a Virgin.” But in the weakest scene of Death Proof, we get four girls laughing about how one of them had fallen into a ditch but thanks to her cat-like reflexes landed on her feet. The less-than-thought-provoking discussion is redeemed by clever camera work panning around the table.
Mr. Tarantino also makes the questionable decision to rehash some of his characters from previous films: Kim (Tracie Toms) is essentially a female version of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction (down to her intonation of the word “mothafucka”) and Jonathan Loughran is cast as the same perverted trucker he played in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
But Death Proof’s few missteps can’t stop its overall, fuel-injected stride; the dialogue and twists and turns in the plot raise it several notches above your average action movie. It is in the realm of the unpredictable that Death Proof succeeds and Planet Terror ultimately fails. You would expect a zombie to try to make mincemeat out of you; you wouldn’t assume the same about the amiable old man sitting at the end of the bar.
