CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Review of Grindhouse

Friday, April 27, 2007

this entry brought to you by the hives, "diabolic scheme"





I'm not old enough to have been around for the sleazy theaters of Robert Rodriguez's and Quentin Tarantino's youth that would play double features of Z-grade exploitation films with shoestring budgets and equal parts sex, violence, and offensiveness all pushed to the highest degree the directors could possibly muster up. Moreover, I'm not really a particular fan of bad movies or graphic violence, though I have seen more than a few. Despite this, when I first saw a trailer for Grindhouse that had been shown at a comic convention, hand recorded on digital camera by someone in the audience, and uploaded to the Internet, filled with exploding zombie bodies, showers of blood, and hot-tub nudity, I instantly proclaimed it as the most insane thing I'd ever seen and immediately showed the rest of my family, and our dialogue while watching it was filled with many exclamation points. This was a movie directed by two of the most revered young directors in America, yet it seemed like an utterly awesome throwback to an era and genre of movies that died with VHS. I'm not a fan of the genre, yet Grindhouse looked exceedingly fun. This was nothing like the group of recent horror movies meant to sap teenagers of their money, this was an obvious attempt at two talented directors giving the finger to mainstream Hollywood and making the best bad movies they could, tying them together with a presentation straight out of the time period these types of movies emerged from. The two features, Planet Terror and Death Proof, each an hour and a half long, are preceded by advertisements for hole-in-the-wall restaurants that are, apparently, located just around the corner, and utterly delightful fake trailers for other Z-Grade horror movies (directed by friends in the horror movie genre, such as Hostel's Eli Roth with the uproariously bad slasher film Thanksgiving; Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright with the indescribably random Euro-horror knock-off Don't!; and Rob Zombie with Werewolf Women of the S.S., which kind of explains itself). And as you've no doubt heard, both movies have missing reels (with apologies from "The Management") that hilariously remove plot exposition, and other film problems, such as scratches and color fading that add to the authenticity. So much care was taken to keep the feel of the original genre that it almost seems like more of a work of passion than the entirety of the two directors' works.

After opening with the brilliant trailer for Machete (tagline: "They've messed with the wrong Mexican!"), director Robert Rodriguez brings us Planet Terror, which between the two is the most giddy and direct of an homage. It's about a small town outside of Austin where a virus gets into the air and turns the citizens into ravenous zombies. There are subplots about the Sheriff and his brother; a nurse, her doctor husband, and their son; and a unit of marines that have been ignored by their government, but these are all just cheesy devices to move the cheesy plot forward. The acting is terrible, the dialogue is worse ("I never miss!" is the credo of gun-toting, ninja-like badass Wray, played by Freddy Rodriguez, to groan-inducing effect), the plot predictable, and the special effects sometimes cheesy. It is also one of the flat-out coolest, most exhilarating movies ever committed to celluloid, with genuinely lovable characters and those that you love-to-hate and are over-the-top loathsome. There are moments when the whole audience would groan at a particular line, or laugh at an over-the-top death (such as the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie getting her brains scooped out of the back of her skull), yet none of these comments are complaints, they're praise-- you could have almost seen the giant grin on Robert Rodriguez's face from our reactions, were he sitting in the back of the theater with us.

Planet Terror is simultaneously a tongue-firmly-in-cheek satire, with such cliche moments you can practically count them off a list, but it is also a full-on homage that wants to take the genre and movie it forward 1000%. Part of what makes those old movies so cheesy is unintentional-- if they had the budget to make it look better than like crap, they probably would have. But as the genre staid stuck with the same limitations year after year, it started to revel in its cheesiness; Rodriguez does the same thing here, only he has the budget and the know-how to deliver all the awesomeness those old movies promised. All the special effects here that are cheesy were meant to be. On the one hand, one guy gets ripped apart limb from limb, yet it's the silliest special effect of the past 20 years that actually made it to theaters. But throughout the movie, Rose McGowan's character Cherry Darling, who has been the postergirl for the movie since the marketing started, has a machinegun/rocket launcher for a leg, and there's not a single moment when it doesn't look completely convincing. While even Rodriguez's adaptation of the testosterone-filled celebration of manliness Sin City had depth, he clearly gets a kick out of making such an explosive, over-the-top piece of schlock that has no other purpose for existing other than the fact that it is fun, and it is deliriously so, and from that, Planet Terror ends up the better of the two movies, though Death Proof is certainly no slouch.

Death Proof, Tarantino's offering, is completely different than its preceding co-headliner. A movie that is ostensibly about a stuntman serial killer that uses his car to murder hapless women instead of an axe, it is almost as much of a Tarantino movie as every other movie he's directed. It is slow and character centric. Pages upon pages upon pages of dialogue go by before anything happens (one scene, with the four main characters sitting around a table and chit-chat about girl things, feels very much like a purposeful gender-swap homage of the restaurant scene in Reservoir Dogs-- when Quentin says he's proud of his female characters in this movie, that pride is justified by this scene alone). Yet it is because of this that sinks what becomes the movie's horror: you get to know all the characters, so when Kurt Russel's Stuntman Mike turns from smooth, charming, devilishly handsome mystery man into a crazed killer, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, that feeling in your gut drops low. Planet Terror was all testosterone giddiness, so audiences laughed out loud at the excessive violence. Death Proof is all suspense, and when the deaths begin you could hear the chokes in everyone's throats, the hearts pounding in individual chests. The girls that are introduced and later killed are killed so brutally and in such horrific detail you could feel the looks of shock and terror in every individual set of eyes, even without turning and looking at them. Death Proof is genuinely frightening, an intense horror movie, like the best exploitation director who is secretly hiding the eye of an auteur, putting together a classic-- think Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not Basketcase.

Then Tarantino does something unexpected, pulling a switcheroo. With the first group of girls killed and another fresh set ready to be slaughtered, Death Proof becomes an entirely different type of exploitation movie. As Rosario Dawson, who takes the emotional place of the audience as an innocent sitting in the backseat of a horse-powered muscle car as her stunt-woman friends, played with peppery wit and charm by Zoe Bell and Tracie Thoms, decide to take turns riding on the hood of the car while the other drives, Stuntman Mike re-enters. What follows is a gearhead's dream, as two muscle cars (one with a hapless woman on top holding on for dear life) slam into each other in a frantic, show-stopping high-speed chase. And since this is supposed to be a low-budget movie, there are no computer effects to make things simpler, and all of the action is shown in real time, without any frame speed-ups as one would expect. This is the real deal, high octane, the way it was delivered in the old days: two fast cars, a narrow road, a camera getting as much of the action as is humanly possible. It gives a different sensation than the pure-adrenaline orgy that is Planet Terror. There's never a point in Death Proof where the entire contents of your guts don't feel like they're up in your throat. While Planet Terror ends up being the more fun of the two, Death Proof is a much smarter movie that is much more deliberate. It may not feel as giddy as Rodriguez's offering, but the last act, with two machines of American know-how smashing into one another, it's hard to not feel like Quentin is a kid in a candy store, gleefully destroying his toys for his own amusement.

Unfortunately, Grindhouse proved to be little more than the director's amusements ultimately, because somehow, despite that it is excellent through-and-through, it under performed at the box office. One would think that the movie nerds alone would flock to the theaters in droves, seeing the movie over and over, at least so that Grindhouse didn't drop out of the box office so quick, but that didn't happen, despite it being the best excuse to waste 10 bucks on a Friday night in years. You would also expect that the teens who throw their money away into the several terrible horror movies that come out every year would also line around the corner to see Grindhouse, but that somehow didn't happen either. There have been rumblings about splitting the two movies up and re-releasing them individually for their own theatrical runs, but I disagree with this idea. While more people would probably go see Planet Terror if it wasn't part of a three-hour-plus package, it would ultimately hurt both movies. Without Death Proof, Planet Terror, while a lot of fun, would ultimately be a big, dumb splatter movie with nothing to stand up on beyond masculine fantasies, despite some surprisingly deep female characters. Death Proof would be an overly slow horror movie if it didn't follow Planet Terror that turns into a childish joyride once the cars start crashing into one another. Individually these movies are great fun-- but don't amount to too much more than, well, really well made exploitation flicks. Together, however, as an experience, Grindhouse, with all of its three hours and twenty minutes of an homage to a genre that's only watched by nerdy enthusiasts (and even then mostly on VHS), it stands above even the wide scope of the sum of its parts: as an experience, it's a piece of artwork, ready to go into the history books as one of the most daring, fun three plus hour movies ever made.
-----



with love from CRS @ 8:44 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment