Double-feature Grindhouse all silly, half-satisfying

Matt Poland Staff Writer

I entered into Grindhouse, a double-bill ode to the exploitation films of the 1970s, equipped with all the necessary accessories: a large tub of popcorn with a triple-squirt of butter, a 32-ounce cup of syrupy Cherry Coke, and a king-size package of Sour Patch Kids. By the end of the 190-minute program—two feature lengths plus a handful of fake trailers—I felt bloated, nauseous, and more than a little malnourished. Like my makeshift meal, Grindhouse offers a lot of bang for your buck, but ultimately, it might be a little too much of a bad thing.

A love letter from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to those grimy junk films from the ’70s, Grindhouse seeks to replicate the experience of sitting in a dingy theater while the projector unspools a couple of grubby flicks featuring bad acting, cheap thrills, and gratuitous nudity; copious amounts of gore always helped, but weren’t requisite. Both directors contribute an 85-minute homage to the genre, while buddies Eli Roth (Hostel), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), and Rob Zombie supply some spoofy trailers. The whole package comes complete with scratched prints, poor camerawork, and missing reels (always during the sex scenes, of course; the implied projectionist is presumably having a field day with the confiscated spools). If you’re lucky, as I was, you might even end up next to a guy drinking God-knows-what from a crumpled paper bag. Authenticity, indeed.

First up on the double-bill is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a tongue-in-cheek compilation of every exploitation cliché imaginable. The incoherent narrative gleefully combines a zombie plague, a testicle-snatching assassin, axe-wielding babysitters (twins, of course), and a go-go dancer with a heart of gold and a leg of lead-pumping firepower. A shopping list of over-the-top adolescent fantasies, the haphazardly-plotted tale makes little narrative sense, but it’s wonderfully campy fun—the sort of hyperbolic pastiche Tim Burton attempted in Mars Attacks! Rodriguez has always been a director keyed into junk, but too often his films have resembled what they’re supposed to be riffing on. Shallow as it may be, Planet Terror is probably the director’s most fully realized work to date; consider it penance for 2005’s surprisingly monotonous Sin City.
Death Proof, Tarantino’s contribution to this splatter-fest, offers a less satisfying take on the genre. Whereas Rodriguez sends up exploitation flicks in all their glorious ridiculousness, Tarantino plays things straighter, attempting to craft a modern-day car-crash classic. The film starts out promisingly enough, with a quartet of young women heading out to a bar, where they meet the ominous Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a gear-head with a car that might just be—you guessed it!—death proof.

However, things go sour once the scratches begin to disappear from the print and it becomes clear that what we’re watching isn’t a pastiche so much as an actual Quentin Tarantino film. This, as of late, means self-indulgent pacing, inconsistent tonality, and forced banter. Structured into two distinct halves—the first depicting an act of cruelty, the second, one of retribution—Death Proof attempts to recapitulate the grrrl power of the Kill Bill films but ends up a bore, a cut-rate revenge thriller whose belated car-chase finale can’t make up for its glacial pacing and inconsistencies. Instead of making a tribute to bad films, Tarantino has simply added another one to the genre.

Nietzsche wrote of the Greeks that they were deep because they were so shallow, profound because they needed to look no deeper than the surface for pleasure. And so it is with exploitation cinema; you appreciate the dripping entrails, the oozing entry wounds, the occasional exploding head—there’s no need to go looking for meaning in that spilled jar of severed testicles. Rodriguez understands this, which is why his entry is sick, slick fun, but Tarantino undermines his effort by looking for depth.

My advice? Go for Planet Terror, stick around for the faux-trailers (Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving teaser may be the highlight of the whole show), and skip out once Death Proof starts: No one’s going to Grindhouse for a snoozer, least of all one with the indulgence of an art film.