EXPLOITATION

Inside the Grindhouse you will find a wide variety of films exploiting various cinematic elements. Mostly sex and violence are heavily on display.

“GRINDHOUSE” (2007)

Starring: Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Kurt Russell & many, many more
Written & Directed by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino
Poster Gallery

Polly Staffle Rating: ***

When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez make movies they do more than tell stories. They create alternate universes that are usually extremely cool and a lot of fun to be a part of. Once in their worlds, the tasteless is often hilarious, violence is a thing of cinematic beauty and nothing is ever too absurd.

Rodriguez always seems to have the imagination of a comic book obsessed adolescent boy. He fills his worlds with lots of guns and gadgets. Action is the key to his movies. Things blowup. Everyone double crosses everyone. Gun fights break out without warning. When violence erupts, Rodriguez makes it seem more fun than harmful. Bad guys get shot, fall down and die. Good guys get shot, bleed, but keep on fighting.

Tarantino on the other hand, has the creativity of the movie geek next door that creeps everyone out. (You know the guy that you’re not sure if he’s a harmless freak with weird sex fetishes or a complete psychopath that could snap at any minute and kill everyone in the vicinity? Yeah, that guy.) He fills his worlds with people that talk too much about trivial things and usually commit unspeakable acts. Moral dilemmas and pop culture references are key to his films. If there are good guys in his movies, it’s because they are about to be killed. If they are not snuffed out, that’s because they’re probably about to do something completely shocking that has you both repulsed and dying of laughter at the same time.

The first time these two worlds collided, they gave us the gangster/road trip/vampire masterpiece “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Now they bring us “Grindhouse,” a double feature of Rodriguez’s sci-fi zombie film “Planet Terror ” and Tarantino’s car chase feature “Death Proof.” Does it live up to my expectations? Yes and no. As a whole with the addition of fake trailers by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Elli Roth and Edgar Wright, “Grindhouse” is one hell of a good time at the movies. However, the whole thing is a tad on the long side, the two features don’t really live up to their b-movie label and both could have been better with a little work.

Separately, “Planet Terror” is pretty weak. At most, it’s a two star movie. “Death Proof” is stronger, but doesn’t feel as genuine as Tarantino’s previous films. It’s about a three star rating. Together with the addition of the trailers (yes the previews are the best part) this 3-hour plus opus becomes a work of art that’s bigger than its pieces. This is a movie that is perhaps best if you know absolutely nothing about it going in. The experience is the fun part. There are tons of little cinematic nuggets for you to discover. There are cameos all through the thing. Some work, while others feel rather forced. There are also WTF? moments, which can be expected in any Rodriguez or Tarantino film, that are both quite bizarre and pretty damn funny. Instead of spoiling any of it for anybody, I’ll try not to give away too much in this review.

PLANET TERROR

“Planet Terror ” opens with a go-go dancer named Cherry Darling, played by Rose McGowan. She does her thing as the credits play and the vibe is very Something Weird. But from there on out Rodriguez’s movie doesn’t really have this feeling. To tell you the truth, it’s not that far removed from any of his other films. If anything, it plays like a spoof of his movies with amped up blood and gore.

McGowan plays the role Selma Hayak usually does in Rodriguez’s work. Only she does a poor job and is mostly annoying. I don’t know if it’s her new facial plastic surgery or the fact I now know McGown is a home wrecker, but she just doesn’t have the magic she had in Gregg Arakki’s “Doom Generation” over a decade ago. It came out after the film’s production that McGowan and Rodriguez recently became a couple, ending the director’s 17-year marriage with his wife Elizabeth Avellan, who is the producer of all his films and five children. The moment when Avellan’s name flashes during the credits over the image of McGowan’s crying face may have really hammered this discomfort element home for me.

Who I did greatly enjoy during “Planet Terror” was Freddy Rodriguez (“Harsh Times,” “Havoc,” and best known as the lovable family man Frederico Diaz on “Six Feet Under”). His character El Wray is the baddest Hispanic causing panic since… well, El Mariachi in “Desperado” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.” El Wray the wrecker isn’t quite the bigger than life killing machine Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi was, but he’s pretty damn close. Wray is more agile and hands on. Instead of blasting everything in sight, he’s a perfect aim. But just like Banderas, Robert Rodriguez takes the good hard working, yet underappreciated Hispanic actor and makes him a complete bad ass.

Overall, “Planet Terror” is fun, but it feels more 80’s than 60’s or 70’s. The gore is of the gross out slimy variety straight out of bad Stephen King and Troma films; not the tongue chopping, blood and guts Herschell Gordon Lewis type I’m heavy into. And despite the fact Cherry is a go-go dancer, there are lesbian characters and the film has a sex scene, the nudity is very minimal. I was ready to wallow in filth, but despite a lot of the hype behind “Grindhouse,” it just didn’t deliver in that department. This film also falls victim to the same problem “Sin City” did - too damn many characters. Focus Robert, focus. Just because a buddy of yours shows up at your house the day you happen to be filming doesn’t mean you have to work him into your movie. Write a script and stick to it.

DEATH PROOF

Tarantino’s “Death Proof” of course offered even less sexuality, unless you are into foot fetishes. It also quite possibly sticks too much to the screenplay. What his half of “Grindhouse” offers is… well, what most of Tarantino’s movies offer - character development, lots of talking, girl power, fun violence and the resurrection of a once decent actor. Though the film has been sold as a slasher, it’s actually not much of one. Sure there is a psycho serial killer played by Kurt Russell, but this film deviates far from the horror genre. It has elements of a 70’s survival or revenge film, but overall it’s more of a thriller.

And thrill it does. I haven’t been into cars or car movies since about second grade, but this movie had me feeling like I did back then, watching “Duel” or “The Car” on late night television. Not only does Quentin gives us the best damn car crash ever put to celluloid, he also delivers an amazing car chase sequence and one of the best and so hilariously wrong film closers I’ve seen in a while.

On the downside, Tarantino’s film doesn’t feel organic. What I mean by that is the characters don’t feel like living, breathing beings. They seem to be only puppets for Tarantino to channel his dialogue and references of his favorite movies, music and television shows through. Everybody in the movie talks, acts and sounds like Quentin Tarantino. No one has their own voice. Nobody makes the lines he’s written their own. They simply spit them out exactly as he would. Perhaps this is why I didn’t really care for any of the characters. I was never sucked into the movie like I am when I watch “Kill Bill” or “Jackie Brown” and felt I was simply watching an exercise in style, violence, shock value and warped humor.

OVERALL

Sadly, at the end of the day, that’s pretty much all “Grindhouse” felt like as a whole. Yes, it’s a fun exercise, a lot more fun than Leslie Sansone could ever lead me through, but I expected and wanted more. Wasn’t that the point? Well, the point was to revive the golden age of b-movies when exploitation, sexploitation and gore was alive and well as the bastard child of cinema. The movies were outrageous and exploited elements like violence, nudity, sex, monsters and taboos because they had to in order to compete with the bigger budgets and star power of Hollywood films. The films were made on the fly and often times had very little planning or post production. There was often times accidental humor due to the limited budgets, bad acting, poorly written scripts and continuity errors. Results usually were raw little films that were attempting to be bigger than they were. Sometimes the movies of Doris Wishman and Herschell Gordon Lewis would run so short, they would have to be padded out with fillers to make the double feature required length of 70 minutes.

“Grindhouse” feels like the opposite, especially “Planet Terror.” I felt I was watching a huge movie that was attempting to look and feel like it was done on a shoestring budget. It was more like John Carpenter’s “Ghost of Mars” or Wes Craven’s “Scream” than their earlier works “The Assault on Precinct 13” and “Last House on the Left.” Both films here are just too polished; Rodriguez’s in the technology department and Tarantino’s in the written word department. Both needed to be stripped down some. Their stories involve way too many characters crammed into a double feature and as a result their runtimes are both close to 90-minutes and they still don’t really feel complete.

Though I wouldn’t call this the definitive grindhouse movie, I still consider it a highly admirable film. Perhaps had it not been called “Grindhouse,” I may have enjoyed it more because I wouldn’t have gone in with my own expectations of what it’s supposed to be. This feels like nothing more than a half-assed Tarantino film double billed with a really half-assed Rodriguez film. Despite my disappointments, the overall project does capture the spirit of drive-in cinema mostly due to the trailers. Rodriguez’s faux preview is for what could be called a “Mexploitation” film, Roth’s feels like a very gritty late 70’s slasher and Wright’s is Euro-horror fun, while Zombie’s is a send-up of the David Friedman produced “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.”

Of course the concept of the double feature with crazy trailers has actually been done for years by Something Weird Video. Some of their DVDs even include a “Let’s Go To The Drive-In” feature, which will allow the disc to not only play the two films, but all of the extras, such as trailers, commercials and weird retro shorts. But Tarantino and Rodriguez have taken it to the mainstream with a mega-budget. Their experiment may be a box office failure, but it’s a success in the hearts and minds of those that love the weird and odd little no-budget movies of yesteryear. When it’s released on DVD, hopefully it will be called “Grindhouse: Volume 1” and serve more as a series banner for more releases to follow. Tarantino and Rodriguez could serve as executive producers on future volumes, but should go back to their epic solo projects. Perhaps it would be best if they left the grinding to unknown directors, working with little budgets and no-name actors, doing some true exploiting.

- CCF, April 2007