• Grindhouse stills • Tarantino & Rodriguez Feature

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/3/07)

"...[G]o and learn to see the worst films; they are sometimes sublime," the surrealist filmmaker and critic Ado Kyrou advised in 1963. While neither Robert Rodriguez nor Quentin Tarantino are (to my knowledge) disciples of Kyrou, they carry his ethos in their bones. Their collaborative epic Grindhouse pays tribute not to just "the worst films" but to the actual experience of seeing them — at least in the United States in the pre-home-video 1970s and '80s, in the disreputable and sometimes dangerous movie palaces that give this pic its title.

Hence, the moviemakers, working with enormous, wide-ranging casts (including uncredited A-listers, indie youngbloods, and veterans of genuine low-budget potboilers) serve up two "features": the paranoid, blood-and-pustule-squirting zombiethon Planet Terror and the serial-killer-on-wheels revenge saga Death Proof, directed by Rodriguez and Tarantino respectively. Each feature is replete with simulated print-scratches, blurry patches, missing reels. Then there are the interstitial ratings bumpers, "Our Feature Presentation" cards, and trailers for nonexistent films, each representing a genre that was part of the core curriculum of exploitation cinema. (They're all tasty, but my favorite was the one by the Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz guys, for a sub-Amicus-style horror feature with a hilariously apt title.) I'm almost surprised that Tarantino and Rodriguez didn't convince their patrons, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, to coat the floors of the theaters themselves with the very special shoe-sole-sticking gunk that was an unavoidable aspect of the real grindhouse experience.

Rodriguez's Planet Terror embodies a kind of paradox with regard to grindhouse "authenticity," in that, for all the effort expended to make the picture look cheap and sleazy, the film is in fact dependent on an extremely sophisticated special effect. After go-go girl Cherry (Rose McGowan, whose character gets extremely agitated by folks who confuse go-go dancers with strippers) gets her leg ripped off by some zombies, she hobbles around first on a replacement limb ripped from a wooden table, then on one hewn from a fully functioning machine gun and rocket launcher. Not the sort of thing that Ted V. Mikels or even Lucio Fulci, both of whom are referenced here, could pull off even in their dreams.