Grindhouse

Tarantino catapults the b-movie genre into the 21st century

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Published: April 9th, 2007 | 1:16pm

Grind house cinema is the degree zero for the trashiest, bloodiest, most violent, and low-budget exploitation films available; films so morally bereft that that American Family Association will be knocking down your door before you get past the opening credits. Sound good so far?

For some, of course, grind house is just another term for a really bad movie.

For genre-mashing master Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill) and his film-making friend Robert Rodriguez (Desperado), however, Grindhouse is a wickedly gory double-feature, penned by the two directors in homage to the shock and schlock films they know and love.

Spanning more than three hours and replete with faux b-movie trailers for fake classics such as Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (“You’ll come home for the holidays in a body bag”), Machete (“They fucked with the wrong Mexican!”) and Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S, Grindhouse is an experience not to be missed.

Rodriguez is up first, with Planet Terror — a kinda post-apocalyptic zombie movie set in the modern-day dirty south. In true b-movie style, the whys and wherefores aren’t really that important, and the film wastes no time in getting right into its hammy plot. Setting the scene for face-bubbling brain-eating zombies with a half-baked line about toxic substances and terrorism, it’s time to bring on the action!

Before too long, the living members of the cast are few and far between. There’s Rose McGowan, who plays one-legged ex-stripper Cherry Darling, sporting a machine gun in place of her amputated leg, her ex-lover El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), who, as luck would have it, happens to be some kind of zombie-killing expert, local greasy-spoon diner owner JT and his brother Sheriff Hague, and Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton). With severed heads and limbs flying and blood splattering in every direction, the gang must work together to beat back an ever-growing army of blood-thirsty zombies, referred to as the Sickos. Bruce Willis is also thrown in the mix as a cameo baddie, but the part of the plot involving him is pretty incomprehensible, although I think that’s the point.

While Rodriguez’s film comes off like a genuine ’70s grind house flick, Tarantino propels the genre into the 21st century with Death Proof — a film that is most definitely grind house Tarantino style. Critics slated Tarantino early on in his career for his portrayal of women, always taking Reservoir Dogs as their prime example — a film in which there are no female characters to speak of, save for the odd woman getting shot at or dragged out of a car. Since then, Tarantino’s had a wave of strong leading ladies: Uma Thurman twice, in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, and Pam Grier’s excellent performance in the role of Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s take on blacksploitation films.

Death Proof— which sees Kurt Russell dragged out of Hollywood obscurity to play Stuntman Mike, a maniac with a fetish for killing pretty girls by driving into them at top speed in his highly customized “death-proof” car — is Tarantino’s ultimate take on the female revenge genre.

Death Proof is viciously violent, perhaps because when violence happens, it’s extreme, but in fact a lot of the film focuses squarely and, at times, rather mundanely on the dialogue between the characters, particularly in developing the characters of the women who are to be Stuntman’s Mikes next victims. Admittedly, a lot of this dialogue isn’t actually that interesting or well written — and it’s actually unclear whether this is an intentional feature to make the film worse than it really is (and thus living up to the legacy of grind house).

Having said that, Tarantino makes some excellent casting choices in Death Proof. Russell is brilliant in the role of a psychotic madman, while Tarantino’s decision to use balls-out New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell — who served as a double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill — as main character couldn’t have been wiser.

In the first half, Death Proof plays a little with the idea that this might be a stalker film, with an unstoppable killer hunting down and picking off victims just like in a slasher flick — the only difference being that his murder weapon is a 1970s black Dodge. However, the second act dispels any of those illusions, making for a rollicking, oftentimes hilarious, ultra-violent adventure, which is part feminist revenge drama in the vein of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! and part cult car fetish film á la Vanishing Point, — a film referenced more that once in the film itself.

You’d have to have an umbrella up your ass not to howl, scream and laugh at
Grindhouse.