DVD Review (R1): GRINDHOUSE – PLANET TERROR / DEATH PROOF
What a bit of disaster this whole Grindhouse experience has been huh? A box office flop in it’s native America, has seen the 70s-B-movie-aping double-bill carved in half, separated and individually expanded with the more acclaimed of the two getting released first around the rest of the world, after much delay, this week leading the way for it’s sister-film when it is dropped in the cinematic graveyard of late November. For many though, they’re opting out of the waiting game and just getting their orders in for the Region 1 DVD releases of Grindhouse’s Planet Terror (released mid-October) and Death Proof (released this week). Where did it all go wrong? Are the films actually any good?
All will be revealed:
The problem, in my eyes, lies with a level of ego and self-indulgence on the part of the filmmakers involved (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) that I have not bore witness to in a long, long time. They wanted to produce a homage to the cinema of their youth but didn’t stay in tune with what today’s cinema-going audience think and feel. Had they separated their egos from the whole equation, they could have accepted the niche appeal of their idea outside of their own fanbase (which, on average, only ever brings them a maximum of around $50 million per picture – Rodriguez’s best ‘batting average’ was Sin City which was considered a success with a take home of just under $40 million!) and adapted it accordingly.
They could have made both of their respective ideas as low-budget movies using the tools available to their 70s grindhouse counterpoints (no different to what, for example, Steven Soderbergh did with his 50s-homaging The Good German… another, erm, flop!), got an all-star cast to work for scale and scratched the living daylights out of the film stock etc. and then turned it into the Weinstein Brothers on a budget of, say, eight to ten million and sat back and just let it find it’s own way without any pressure or expectation. No different to how the Weinstein’s treat the likes of Kevin Smith.
This is not a foreign concept to the filmmakers themselves. Particularly Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez, when making Once Upon A Time In Mexico, the third entry in his El Mariachi trilogy, knew that there was a loyal but limited fanbase for his gunfighting guitar-player movies so kept the budget low, pulled in an impressive cast to work below their usual pay scales and forced himself to be inventive. The film was the lesser of all the Mariachi movies but still turned a healthy profit because Rodriguez was in tune with who his audience were and what he could expect from them.
Therefore, we have to think that – in what has become known as ‘The Grindhouse Debacle’ – it must have been Tarantino’s ego that corrupted Mr Rodriguez and dragged him along, turning a potential low-budget niche movie with limited appeal into a barely marketable, time-consuming monstrosity that allegedly ended up costing in the region of $67.5 million athough Harvey and Bob still try to spin the final figures as low fifties, on a final US take-home of just under $12 million!
The films though? What about the films? Because behind the failure, the accusations about poor-marketing, the ego, the self-indulgence and my own aforementioned opinions, it’s all about the films at the end of the day. Did Grindhouse fail because the films themselves just weren’t – dare I say it – that good?
Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror essentially plays like what would happen if a projectionist spliced Desperado with Night of the Living Dead. It’s a relatively fun encounter for the most part but wears its welcome out long before the climax comes into view. Imagine if you will, going on the world’s greatest rollercoaster ride and then getting off and going straight back on. Again and again, and again. Sooner or later the experience becomes a little tiresome. Planet Terror, to me, is the movie equivilent of that experience. It’s fun, then it becomes stupid fun, then it becomes stupid, stupid soon turns into silly and before you know it the film has moved itself, within it’s first two acts, from genuine cult curiosity to slice of pure escapist nonsense to borderline guilty pleasure to ‘This is just becoming a fucking car crash!’
The film essentially deals with the aftermath of an experimental bio-weapon being released, turning thousands into zombie-like creatures, and the expected rag-tag group of survivors that have to band together to stop the infected and those behind the bio-weapon’s untimely release. Mixed in amongst all this is a girl with a machine gun for a leg, Bruce Willis playing the whole thing for poe-faced hilarity and Tarantino himself as a rapist! I shit you not!
The hospital dust-up between the “infected” and the “survivors” is a worthy reminder of just how superbly Rodriguez can write, shoot and execute exhilerating action sequences. However, to a bigger extent then Tarantino’s Death Proof, his deliberate film-stock scratches, sound-drops and missing reels hurt the film considerably. The film itself is a stupid encounter that can proof worthwhile to you if you’re in a silly sort of mood (just ask Kristina!) but these self-indulgent elements just prove too distracting! Rodriguez told Total Film magazine “… The idea was to make those sort of grindhouse movies of our youth but with the budget they weren’t afforded!” Well if you’re making it with the budget they weren’t afforded, you wouldn’t ever have to worry about film-stock scratches, sound-drops and missing reels would you?
Planet Terror is not terrible (that was the best semi-pun I can attempt!) but it is completely overcooked and ridiculous stuff. Perhaps they should have had this film on the second part of the Grindhouse bill because it is SO ridiculous that it could have carried a confused and irritated audience through just on it’s bare-faced adrenaline alone! Stupid fun it is, but perhaps it’s too stupid for it’s own good?
And so to Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and if Planet Terror was too self-indulgently demented for it’s own good with it’s tongue rammed to far into it’s own cheek that it was sticking out through the skin, then Death Proof is so self-indulgently poe-faced and deliberately paced like a crippled tortoise that it betrays the “slasher movie but with a car instead of a masked knifeman” concept that it’s writer/director sells it to us as.
The film tells of two pairs of voluptuous women, separated by a two act structure, who are stalked in different geographical locations by ‘Stuntman Mike’ (a surprisingly bloody good Kurt Russell, apparently having the time of his life!) a scarred stuntman who uses his “death proof” cars to execute his murderous, misogynistic plans against women in general.
The first thing that hits you, outside of the goofy/fun opening title sequence, straight away is how obvious and leaden Tarantino’s dialogue is. His dialogue has always been a joy to allow your ears to indulge themselves in because its actually fun to listen to in a thoroughly ridiculous sort of way. We all know nobody out there actually speaks like anyone does in a Tarantino movie but it doesn’t stop the stuff being any less enjoyable does it? But here, in Death Proof, it doesn’t flow like in Pulp Fiction or feel effortless and cool like in Jackie Brown or like bursts of comic book speech bubbles like in Kill Bill. It just comes across as well… kind of stupid, inane and forced.
And that is Death Proof‘s problem; there’s a whole lot (probably 80%) of talking and not a whole lot of women-murdering-car-crashes. However, what makes the film teeter into the area of recommendable is that despite being a Tarantino movie where the dialogue is the worst thing about it, when the big-chinned egotist does put his foot down on the accelerator and bring us some CGI-less set-pieces of pure car-mageddon, the film lifts itself into a place of pure, unadulterated entertainment. Not unlike Planet Terror before it gets too daft for it’s own good.
The first execution of a group of girls by Stuntman Mike is an edge of the seat, gore-drenched, perfectly executed piece of cinema and the nigh-on thirty minute chase finale is an out-and-out joy to your eyes as the hunter becomes the hunted across the Texan landscapes. The dialogue throughout the sequence is utterly atrocious and Zoe Bell cannot act for shit, but then again she hangs off a car bonnet at 110 miles an hour with no wires whilst another car smashes into her so I think we can forgive her for not matching Meryl Streep’s levels of acting-abilities.
The ending too is a stupid, clumsy let-down but the car sequence before it has been so exhilerating that you just don’t come to notice it until the film, and it’s cool/catchy end title song, has passed and you’ve got your breath back.
Too much below-par talk, not enough tire-squealing mayhem to really do justice to it’s concept and just as infuriatingly distracting and self-indulgent as it’s sister movie (the sound-drops, screen jumps and [added-back-in] black and white sequence that is black and white for no distinguishable reason are just annoying more than anything else!).
In conclusion (and this review has been as long as an essay so I may as well conclude it like one) neither film is a total disaster and both have a lot to offer but from the likes of Rodriguez and Tarantino, you’ll expect and deserve much, much better then this!
NB: neither release appeared to have the ‘faux’ grindhouse trailers for Edgar Wright’s Don’t, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS but all are now easily findable on YouTube. Roth’s is the best of the three, Wright’s running a close second and Zombie’s is just – Nicholas Cage as Fu Manchu aside – stupid and nigh-on unwatchable!
5 Responses to “DVD Review (R1): GRINDHOUSE – PLANET TERROR / DEATH PROOF”
Well, I have to be honest and say “I’m not surprised”. disappointed maybe, but surprised, no.
QT has never rocked my world the way he does a lot of peoples – I find his movies are quite often overrated – but I hoped that in this project he’d found his spiritual home.
RR, on the other hand, I dig a lot. I enjoy pretty much every movie of his that I have seen and the fact that El Mariachi was such a low budget wonder it makes you wonder how he screwed this up, as coupled with his experiences on Sin City, he knows how to deliver excellent looking movies on a very low budget.
My guess? QT & RR, when they get together, are like any pair of friends who are trying to outdo each other, in a friendly way, and without some kind of restraining hand (like I assume Frank Miller was on Sin City for instance) things soon get out of hand and silly. This might even explain why I find a lot of QT’s movies to be a little overblown….maybe he never has a restraining hand on his arm…
Anyway, it seems like a shame. Apart from anything else it really sounds like they just completely misjudged the audience. Maybe they’d have been better off releasing them apart for the mainstay of audience’s, without any scratches or other “Grindhouse” tributes and then releasing the “Grindhouse Tribute” version on a limited release for the fans of Grindhouse movies, who would have understood what the hell was going on!
Christ, this is going on a bit – right, great review mate. I am still going to watch these sometime but I am really not in any rush to see them. Which is a real shame as these could have been so good..
Death Proof was like an episode of The View: bitches yapping on and on….. I liked Planet Terror for the sheer ridiculousness of it all. RR did a better job at capturing the corny, trashy grindhouse feel than Tarantino did.
And if you want to know why this experiment tanked, go on Youtube and watch the trailer. Seriously. Go watch it now and then come back here to continue reading this rant. I’ll be waiting………………….ok, you saw that, right? Now you answer me this: did that trailer sell a FILM or a CONCEPT? Big difference, people. All the trailers and commercials blasted out TARANTINO/RODRIGUEZ!!!!! TWO FOR ONE!!!!! Hate to break it to you, but these two don’t have THAT wide a fanbase. They have their niche fans, but these guys don’t have the borad appeal that Spielberg has. When you see ol’ Stevie’s name on a trailer, you hear the whole audience go “oooh”. When you see those two names, I hear 90% of the audience go “SO?” This wasn’t sold to the public as a movie, it was sold as a chance to sit in a theater and watch RR and QT jerk it and cum all over the screen for three hours. Honestly, if you tell me that the trailer gave you a good idea of what the film was about, you’re out of your mind. Nobody will see a flick if they have no clue what the **** it is about. Internet fanboys stroking themselves will only get you so far in terms of box office. SoaP learned that the hard way,and Cloverfield needs to hear this ****ing lesson, too. The internet curiosity has died down considerably on that ****er. We fanboys(and girls) might still be hunting for clues, but how many people walking down the street who don’t follow this kind of thing closely, how many of them would know what I was talking about if I came up to them and say, “What do you think about Cloverfield?” I laugh my head off when I hear people speculate about why GH bombed. Coming from a person who likes QT and RR, that trailer didn’t do shit for me, and if a FAN of theirs wasn’t moved by the trailer, what the **** did they expect from a random person on the street?
Well, I loved them both. I had a great time at the theater when I saw Grindhouse. And I’m not going to get into why it flopped, there are plenty of reasons why.
And “RR did a better job at capturing the corny, trashy grindhouse feel than Tarantino did.” Actually I thought Tarintino’s was more in line with the 70s explotation feel.
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