[Movie Review] GRINDHOUSE – “As Intended”
So the dust has settled, the “extended editions” have been released separately all over the world (and reviewed by yours truly, which you can indulge in by clicking right here!) and Messiahs Tarantino and Rodriguez have slinked off, licking their wounds, counting their $11.2 million in box office receipts and getting their heads down on, for Tarantino, scripting Inglorious Bastards (finally!) and finishing off the final edit on Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, whilst for Rodriguez its pushing forward on pre-production for Sin City 2 and 3, Shorts and a spin-off Machete movie (if you believe the IMDB that is!). Perfect timing then to reopen the old “Grindhouse was a failure” wound by taking it on a limited-screening run through the major cities here in the UK. My friend Porter, me and Porter’s girlfriend, Alex (just blatantly namechecking for the sheer sake of it!) checked it out last night. Is it the true “failure” it has been made out to be?
You’ve really got to experience Grindhouse ‘as intended’. Seriously. You’ve got to see it with the curtain go up on the Machete trailer, the abrupt break on the end credits of Planet Terror into those faux trailers made by Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie and Eli Roth and then spinning into the second part of the double bill. Grindhouse is a movie “experience”. It’s by experiencing it that you come to realise that the director’s offerings aren’t really intended (Tarantino says differently regarding his extended cut of Death Proof - I don’t believe him!) to last long or be savoured as stand-alone films for years to come. You also come to realise that the movies are a hell of a lot more fun when viewed in this manner then they are as individual movies. Still severely flawed, but fun none the less!
Machete (the fake trailer for a Danny Trejo “mariachi” style movie that is allegedly now meant to be in the offing!) got the biggest laughs of the evening; more specifically Cheech Marin’s appearance as a gunslinging priest. If they are going to develop a movie out of this then it’s the Marin character I think they should go with. From there, we’re straight into Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which is – as you know – a OTT splicing of the director’s own Desperado with Night of the Living Dead.
It’s a fun encounter that played better for me here then it did when I reviewed the R1 release last year but still it’s an experience that goes from fun to 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!’ Experiencing it as Grindhouse and not as Planet Terror, I’m going to change my opinion from it becoming a car crash to it NEARLY becoming one!
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 and it plays fantastically well up on the big screen. Even the deliberate film-stock scratches, sound-drops and missing reels that hurt the film considerably on home viewing become nothing of the sort on a cinema screen. I still think that Rodriguez should have got a little more down, dirty and low-tech to keep in with the “style” of the Grindhouse experience because seeing a dumb-ass movie done with such technical accomplishment was bothersome to me. I still stand by my original comment; 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?
It’s completely overcooked and ridiculous stuff but up on the big screen that is part of it’s charm and not part of it’s flaws. I still think they should have played this on the second half of the bill because it is SO ridiculous that it could have carried any confused and irritated members of the audience through just on it’s bare-faced adrenaline alone!
Then there’s those trailers; namely Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which you can find here, Edgar Wright’s Don’t, which you can find here, and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which you can find here. I thought Wright’s was the strongest in terms of the look, feel and tone of the Grindhouse experience – especially in terms of what the UK got from D-grade, fleapit cinemas in the early 70s. However, from a personal stand-point, I loved Eli Roth’s fake trailer. I thought it was absolutely spot on. The voice-over, the styling, the pace… everything was so fucking perfect. Anyone who has ever seen trailers for the likes of Halloween II, Black Christmas, Prom Night etc. knows just how brilliantly realised this is! It makes you hope that, if they continue with this straight to DVD “Grindhouse” label that Tarantino and Rodriguez talked of, then this is a film they work on brining to the screen exactly as is! Zombie’s effort? Didn’t do much for me at all but it brought the house down with the crowd I was seeing it with!
And from there, we’re straight into Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. I originally referred to this film as “… 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.”
I haven’t really changed my opinion too much from that comment. Asides from the black-and-white lap-dance sequence and more scenes involving the gorgeous Mary Elizabeth Winstead abandoned with the redneck, I really couldn’t see what Tarantino was talking about when he said he has “stream-lined the hell out of” Death Proof to make it work for Grindhouse. It’s more tolerable in it’s edited down form but, having seen it three times now in varying forms, I just find that I’m really starting to dislike Tarantino’s effort. Ironic isn’t it that, on encountering Grindhouse ‘as intended’, I grow to like a lot more the film I originally pegged as the lesser effort and grow to dislike the one I originally favoured.
It’s still flawed by obvious and leaden dialogue. Tarantino’s words have 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. Zoe Bell is a mighty fine stuntwoman but her performance here (as “herself”) just gets more and more annoying. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still elements to like about Death Proof; Kurt Russell’s performance for one (man, he would have owned the world if Tarantino had kept him on as “Bill” when Warren Beatty left the Kill Bill production!), not to mention the first execution of a group of girls by Stuntman Mike which 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. However, the dialogue throughout the sequence is utterly atrocious and Zoe Bell, as I said, cannot act for shit.
I haven’t changed my opinion on Tarantino’s effort. In fact the positives have decreased; the ending 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. There’s still far too much below-par talk and not enough tire-squealing mayhem to really do justice to it’s concept.
Neither film is a total disaster and both have a lot to offer but as stand-alone movies from the likes of Rodriguez and Tarantino, you’ll expect and deserve much, much better then this! However, as a ‘full’ 3hr 31 (taking into account trailers and ads before hand!) “Grindhouse” experience, this was infectious fun of the highest order and the film should have been allowed to find it’s audience around the world. Death Proof and Planet Terror, separated from each other, don’t do the concept anywhere near the justice it deserves!
It’s Coming – November 6th 2008*
* Allegedly!
6 Responses to “[Movie Review] GRINDHOUSE – “As Intended””
I always saw Planet Terror as a Carpenter homage really. Instead of a mishmash of Desperado and Night of the Living Dead.
I personally like Death Proof, and yeah there was a lot of talking, but if you’ve ever seen an exploitation movie, 90% of them are like that. So I guess you can fault him for being too true to the structure of those movies.
Definitely one of my favourite things about PLANET TERROR was the music, there were some fantastic musical cues from early Carpenter movies in there. And the whole ‘cops’ teaming with ‘criminals’ vibe and the under-siege mentality were definitely Carpenter-esque.
I didn’t outright hate DEATH PROOF but it’s most definitely, for me, the weakest movie Tarantino has made!
PS
Robert Rodriquez said in TOTAL FILM back when PLANET TERROR was released in November that the movie was “the bastard stepchild of Desperado and Night of the Living Dead as reared by John Carpenter”
So I guess between the two of us Grundy we managed to tick off all sources of inspiration!
I don’t want to see Death Proof ever again. Just not my thing at all, but overall, the grindhouse experience was one helluva fun ride. It was made ever funnier by people who weren’t aware that two movies were being shown. When DP started up, some dumb chick sitting behind me cried out, “There’s ANOTHER one?!”
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