Sorry guys - while I love exploitation cinema, horror, schlock, cheese, drive-in flicks, B-movies, blaxploitation and Kung Fu - I hated Planet Terror and Death Proof, collectively known as Grindhouse. Actually more accurately, I hated the second half of the combined entity known as Grindhouse.
For those of you just joining us, the Grindhouse premise is this: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez love bad, trashy 70's and 80's schlock. For the bulk of his career, it's been clear that Tarantino loves movies that shock, titillate and otherwise have no redeeming values or features. And so the two set out to make intentionally bad, schlocky movies and then releases them together as if it were a double bill playing in a 42nd Street theater back in the '70s right down to the advertisements, film trailers, missing reels, projector mishaps and prints so scratchy and flawed they're close to deterioration.
In Death Proof, Tarantino unrolls a story about three Fine Young Thangs as they unexpectedly find themselves on a collision course with a charming stranger named Stuntman Mike - only to fall to a wicked end. Later, the tables are turned when Mike finds another group of girls to follow, it turns out that sometimes girls fight back!
The problem with Planet Terror, the first half of the Grindhouse double feature, is that Robert Rodriguez turns the action and blood and gore and gunfights up to 11 at the start and leaves the knob there for the remainder of the movie, bludgeoning you into a state of numbness. However while it's beating you over the head with a blood soaked baseball bat, at least it moves briskly along. And I'm fine with that - in a proper grindhouse flick, absolutely anything goes - except for the one prime directive that you must never, ever break: don't bore the audience.
The problem with Death Proof is that Tarantino has two settings: Warp Speed and Dead Stop. When the movie is running at the Warp Speed setting it's really good, but we have to suffer through nearly an hour and a half of Dead Stop to get there. Instead of pus oozing zombies being vaporized by a million rounds of ammunition, we're suffering through watching four completely interchangeable women going on endlessly about drugs and sex and pop culture without ever establishing anything close to credible or likable characters.
I have always contended that a strong editor would improve any Tarantino flick by at least 75%. The man has an inability to shut the hell up! He loves the sound of his own voice (or in this case his endless "witty banter") and can't bear to cut one second of it. Here, let me sum up Death Proof for you: Foot Fetish shot, F-Bomb, F-Bomb, lengthy conversation on an obscure 80's pop song, F-Bomb, More pop-culture, Gratuitous Cameo, F-Bomb, F-Bomb, name-check old movie, F-Bomb, Car Chase, end credits.
That's pretty much the problem that the whole project labors under - self-indulgent twaddle. Rodriguez doesn't restrain himself from going too far over the top, and here Tarantino lets the characters ramble on and on and on and on about random stuff we just don't care about until we've forgotten what the point was or have given up completely on the punch line.
So that's the bad news. What's the good news? The car chase at the end of the movie is the best god damned thing committed to film in 15 years. Sadly, the art of the car chase is lost in Hollywood. The last good - I mean really, really good - car chase that was all 100% cars and raw steel and stunt people in peril was Terminator 2. You might occasionally get a Gone In 60 Seconds or The Fast And The Furious, but compared to the classics like Bullitt or the Blues Brothers or the truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark, you just don't get that tire squealing, hubcap flying, muscle car goodness these days. Well, Death Proof delivers about 20 minutes of hard core old school stunt work devoid of any CGI trickery whatsoever (plus about another six minutes towards the start of the film). Fantastic!
Again, I'll put forth the hypothesis that Death Proof (and Planet Terror) would have worked better as a trailer. Take the whole movie, compress it down into five minutes and add in some of that 42nd Street hyperbole in the form of a voice over. You know, something like "Soldiers of fortune who shoot for loot, slay for pay, and slash for cash! Two masters with a thousand ways to kill! Back to back, they face Sudden Death! Molten madness erupting in a vicious vortex of violence! Sudden Death comes screaming out of the skies! The savage struggle for survival? Unleashed! Unchained! Uncontrollable! and Death Proof would have been Pure Unrefined Awesome.
THE DVD -
How do you evaluate a movie like this? On one hand, Death Proof looks horrifically bad - dust, grain, cigarette burns and scratches all over the place - everything that would normally be a big black mark against the DVD - but since they're intentional, I wont hold it against the film. The thing I *WILL* hold against it is that it's not as effective as in Planet Terror, where the manufactured scratches are on the film throughout its running time. In Death Proof, Tarantino eventually tires of the joke and the missing frames and fake blemishes vanish half way through.
THE EXTRAS -
While there's two discs, there isn't a commentary anywhere to be found. The only trailers we get are ones for Death Proof, Planet Terror, 1408, Black Sheep and Feast. The fake trailers for Machete, Werewolf Women of the S.S., Don't and Thanksgiving are nowhere to be seen on either disc. Considering that they were the best things about the Grindhouse double feature, it's a damn shame to see them left off.
At the very least they could have dug up some Public Domain trailers actually from the Grindhouse/Drive-In era and thrown them on. At least they would have fit thematically!
Disc two gets a documentary focusing on the film, more about the great stunt drivers, both old and new. Featured here are stunt co-coordinator for Death Proof Jeff Dashnaw, and his team Buddy Joe Hooker, Steve Davidson, Tracy Dashnaw, Chrissy Weathersby and Terry Leonard.
Next is a short piece about stuntwoman in general and Zoe Bell in particular. Following that is a small segment on Kurt Russell, where pretty much everyone says how cool he is (which, as a statement of fact, I have a hard time arguing against). Then there's a short with Tarantino discussing his female casting choices.
There's the uncut version of Baby It's you, performed by Mary Elizabeth Winstead of Burt Bacharach's song for Smith. There's another casting short, focusing on the guys this time around, and a section on Tarantino's editor since Reservoir Dogs, Sally Menke (who really needs to be fired).
All in all, I'd wait for the inevitable two movie box set with Planet Terror that is sure to have some great extras and the missing fake trailers.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
Well, if Tarantino set out to make a bad grindhouse style 70's flick, then he succeeded famously (and I mean that both as an insult and a compliment at the same time). Yet again Tarantino's weakness for rambling pointless dialogue nearly scuttles the movie and the horribly slow pace almost makes you fall asleep. Still, if you just skip to the last couple of chapters of the disc and the amazing car chase, you should be in good shape.
(An aside, you know the really sad thing? For the budget of just ONE of these sections, Roger Corman or Canon Films could have made a dozen films, and at least 50% of them would have been better than this! William Castle would have given his right arm for this kind of money!)
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