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 The collaborative project between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez, Grindhouse, is homage to a genre of movies I had never really seen, nor movies my parents never really watched.
According to Roger Ebert, who states in his review of the films that he predates both directors and never recalls double-billings quite like Grindhouse, it matters little. I think we are seeing the world as Tarantino and Rodriquez saw it – their memories of the bad films of the 70s are distorted to the point of fine art.
They are like abstract paintings in 70mm, not meant to be taken at face value. So how should we take them? Well, let’s get the facts down first. I should have explained that Grindhouse is two movies, one by Tarantino, Death Proof, and one by Rodriquez, Planet Terror. In between are all sorts of scratchy and grainy clips, missing reels and out of focus promotions of other 70s fare, meant once again to convey mood more than reality. The question I have is this one: were the horror films of the 70s so inane to really offer up something called “Werewolf Women of the SS” or “Machete” or “Thanksgiving?” I won’t go into detail about these promos but they were funny as hell, almost “Scary Movie” funny as in lampoons of the entire genre and maybe that is what Tarantino and Rodriguez came close to achieving: a serious lampoon. But dare we dodge the most important question: are these movies, this movie, cool? Is it deserving of a Queen, King, perchance an Ace? Yes, it is cool, not Ace material but then that is a hard one to get dealt from us. urely, Grindhouse is a Queen, at times a King movie. There is not much else I found better in Death Proof versus Planet Terror and vice versa. Both have roles by big name actors such as Kurt Russell in Death Proof and Bruce Willis in Planet Terror. Both of these guys are top notch cool actors and they seem to be having fun, which usually means the audience can have fun too. Maybe that is what I liked about the films most. There is a sense of fun behind all the zombies in Planet Terror and the entire bar talk in Death Proof, and the distorted view of violence Grindhouse lends to both pictures. I am not so sure about Rodriguez but Tarantino seems to be either a great artist who uses his film to say something inherently universal about violence, which one day we will look back on and say, now there was a fucking genius on social commentary or he is simply a dude that is extremely talented yet never matured at all beyond hack and slash or the banalities of high school titilations. I say I am not so sure about Rodriquez because I am not as familiar with his work as I am Tarantino’s. I will have to say Sin City was pretty damn cool though and if anything I can say Rodriquez and Tarantino are psychos of the same machete. This leads to my description of what these movies are about. Death Proof involves a guy named Stunt Man Mike (Russell) who goes psycho running down some hot chick’s on the highway with guns and all sorts of tough girl talk. Planet Terror is in the tradition of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, only violent and cartoonish to the point of absurdity. One of the leading dames in the movie gets her leg amputated and her boyfriend attaches a machine gun to it. Preposterous – perhaps, probably surely. Cool as all hell: definitely. I did think it dragged on a little too long, but credit is due to how creatively they really fucked up some zombies. There is some weird anatomical fascination either Tarantino or Rodriguez have about feet. I think there is a lady in each movie that gets a leg lopped off. One unlucky heroine gets a machine gun prosthetic; the other gets her ticket punched. Grindhouse loves to split bodies apart in ways that almost make you get used to it.
I am not sure either movie is that much better than its counterpart, so I am not going to split hairs about which one was better: Proof or Terror. They were both pretty darn cool. What makes a Tarantino and Rodriquez film unique are more or less their fascination with pop culture references, lengths they will travel to achieve some new level of grotesqueness and frankly how cool their characters all tend to be in a retro sort of way. These are two guys I would have loved to have been misinformed from in college History class were the system so screwed up they taught classes. As it were they make movies. I watch them. And, that is the way it was meant to be at least until zombies get us or Stunt Man Mike gives you a mohawk with the wheels of his bitchn car. Matthew J. DeReno is a writer living in Pittsburgh.
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