Movie Review: Grindhouse

This isn’t a book or music review, but I’m bending the Dark charter a bit today because I’m a member of Final Girl’s Film Club and this is my entry for this month’s Film Club choice, Grindhouse (2007.) Many of you probably already know that it’s a double-feature of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.

I think the filmmakers set out with several common goals. There may be more, but the ones I caught were:

• Use a lot of the same actors in both movies.
• Have both films reference each other in clever ways.
• Express nostalgia for watching old films in theaters.
• As part of the nostalgia use effects to imitate what a film used to look like after it had been shown a lot. So both films use things like scratches, sloppy retitles, and spliced-out parts to look old.

There’s something about sexual politics and emasculation going on in both these movies too, but I decided not to cover that.

Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror

Wow I loved this movie. There are several sub-plots to it but the basic gist is this: A military biological weapons project goes wildly awry and a town in Texas is over-run by zombies who are hungry for brains. The result is suspense, gore, violence, crazy stop-motion effects, and hilarity. Choice moments include:

Horrible Infections Catalogued

…and…

All that pole dancing finally paid off!

I had to edit my list of favorite moments down quite a bit so as not to bore you with screenshots. The moment I keep coming back to in this movie is the part where Dakota, the maybe-lesbian anesthesiologist who is trying to escape her psychopath doctor husband, shares a funny and tender moment with her son, and tells him to be careful with the gun she just gave him (with instructions to shoot his father if he shows up.) She says. “Be careful where you point that thing. You’ll blow your own face off.” Then she gets out of the car and hasn’t made it ten feet before you see a flash from the car and hear the gun go off. I haven’t figured out how, exactly, this scene encapsulates the whole movie, but for me it does. Probably because it takes a horror standard (the wise boy and his panicked, caring mother) and turns it on its ear.

Be careful with that.

I also have to say that I loved how Rodriguez used the “old film” effects in a purposeful manner. There are several choice scenes where the film jitters, develops streaks, warps out of shape, or gets “jammed” and burns through in ways that add depth to the movie. Also, the ending credits are simply beautiful.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

I have to say up front that besides the inevitable Pulp Fiction, I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino, so for this film I decided to set my baggage aside and give it as fresh a viewing as I could. I had my work cut out for me, it appears, especially because Netflix said I was going to hate it.

Uh Oh. 2.5 stars?

Netflix turned out to be right, but not for the reason I expected. Death Proof is agonizingly long, boring, and stupid. By stupid, I mean that all the dialogue is stupid and everything everyone does is stupid and boring. Tarantino knows how to make an interesting movie with sly dialogue so this turn of events makes me think he set out to make a dull, stupid movie on purpose.

XXXX lap dance = *YAWN*

The dialogue is about who is and isn’t sleeping with who, who is in this month’s fashion magazine, who isn’t drinking and who is (and how much.) The lap dance is boring. Even the final chase scene is rendered impotent by someone yelling the already-tired-in-2007 phrase “tap that ass!” over and over and over and over.

Om Nom Nom Nom

For me the most disturbing part of this movie was watching Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell) eat nachos. Another thing I liked about this film was the Technicolor-like opening credits. Oh – and for some reason I was fascinated when Stuntman Mike put eye drops in his eyes, and then also where he stopped to sneeze but then didn’t. (This may sound like I’m joking but I assure you I’m serious.) See? I found three nice things to say.

Besides the coloring, Tarantino decides to use his “old film” effects almost randomly, and they end up mostly pulling the viewer out of the scene to remind them that they are watching a film, not a movie. Perhaps most annoying to me is that Tarantino decides to pull a Tarkovsky and insert a seemingly arbitrary black and white scene into a color movie. The black and white scene chronicles another several dull minutes at a convenience store.

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5

Grindhouse – Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez – Dimension Films – 2007

View Planet Terror at Amazon
View Death Proof at Amazon