Grindhouse, home of the B-movie.

What better way to follow-up a post on gun control than with a review of Grindhouse. No gun control here, that’s for sure. I didn’t know what to expect after reading a few lousy reviews of the flick, but since it’s Tarantino and Rodrigeuz I kept an open mind. For me, I wasn’t disappointed. I watched a lot of the flicks referenced here like White Line Fever, Vanishing Point and Deathrace 2000 and a slew of zombie flicks. Both directors hold a mirror up to those slasher/exploitation flicks of the seventies and nail them perfectly. And that’s where they both work best. Lower your expectations–Pulp Fiction’s ultra-hip dialogue this ain’t, nor is it meant to be.

The first film is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Forget the Scary Movie series. It’s to 70s zombie horror flicks what Blazing Saddles was to Westerns and Mars Attacks! was to the UFO movies of the 1950s. No shortage of gore, bad dialogue or bullets. Pretty cool stunts too. Makes From Dusk Till Dawn look like an episode of Sponge Bob.

Tarantino’s Deathproof casts Kurt Russell perfectly in the second feature. Say what you will about Tarantino, but the guy takes stars trapped in mass-market genres and gives them new life. Quentin’s flick centers around two separate groups of women and Kurt Russell. Without giving too much away, the typical exploitation format does a 180 in a Thelma and Louise sequence at the end. Yeah, it’s got his patented dialogue scenes which some have knocked, and maybe some of those F-bomb barrages do sound better when Harvey Keitel says them. Still, when’s the last time four women sat around shooting the shit without it leading to Hugh Grant marrying one of them at the end in some date flick?

Not here.

Overall, this is exploitation film time for sure. The opening trailers, the intermission trailers, the film effect designed to age the film, missing projector reel sequences, even the fake ads for local businesses. There is also a perfect trailer for a movie called ‘Don’t!’ which is better than anything Scary Movie has ever skewered. YouTube has clips obviously shot on someone’s own video camera, but see it in actual film. (Ironic that those illegal clips further enhance the look and feel of Grindhouse.) I dunno man, people knocking this must just love the usual shit out there. For $8 and three and a half hours, they gave me my money’s worth.

Especially as a creative. Take the retro design of these films. Right now Grindhouse is the best thing going. Both directors gave it a complete Grindhouse look. They didn’t dabble. The sticky floor I felt was probably not their doing but added to the authenticity. But as retro goes so many times these days, the source material is forced or barely there. Take That Seventies Show or a commercial like The LeBrons. Both merge a sitcom format from way back with a modern slick sensibility. That’s not a bad thing because they work. I just think if you’re going to pay tribute to a certain look and feel, don’t fuck around and hide your sources under a slick veneer. Go all-in. Grindhouse has the best title sequences since Seven. (No slight on Kyle Cooper either, but the production house kicked ass on all the graphics here.)

Amazing though how people knock this. To each his own I guess. Sin City is arguably one of the coolest flicks in recent times. Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs alone would buy any director a lifetime of passes. But someone like M. Night gets a pass even though he’s still trying to make a movie that convinces people Sixth Sense was no fluke. Now, I will agree with one critique heard ‘round the world: Quentin gotta stop acting in his flicks so much.

Still, Rodriguez and Tarantino have been far more consistant in their filmmaking and yet they take shit for this, which, taken on the whole, is really not that far off from their usual fair. (Save for the Kids series.) It’s making a slow crawl towards breaking even on production costs but I think it will get there–eventually. Next week will show if it has legs–or if they get cut off. For some reason, I think this will possibly have a better Second Life on DVD though.

Tags: Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez