Double whammy

>> Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse recreates all the thrills and
spills of an old-school sleazefest

by MARK SLUTSKY

As if to make amends for breaking Kill Bill into two separate films, Quentin Tarantino’s packed at least two movies worth of entertainment into his latest, Grindhouse, a collaboration with fellow genre-phile Robert Rodriguez, with a handful of other directors pitching in. The idea, as you’ve probably already gleaned from the publicity, is to recreate a night at an old, ’70s-style, sleazy movie theatre, the kind of place that barely exists in this age of mall-style entertainment complexes and the DVD-fuelled home video explosion.

So what you get with Grindhouse is actually two entire features, with Rodriguez and Tarantino each taking the helm for one, plus a handful of trailers directed by their buddies, like Eli Roth (Hostel) and Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects). The trailers are a really effective vehicle for the kind of bombastic pastiche on display here—especially entertaining is Rodriguez’s own Machete, with Danny Trejo as a day-labourer out for revenge. Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. is good for a couple of yuks too.

Rodriguez’s actual feature, Planet Terror, doesn’t stray too far from the intentionally scratchy footage, bad special effects and overall goofy goriness of the trailers. Set in a small town where a bioweapon-derived zombie epidemic is causing calamity (the explanation for the epidemic is particularly funny), the movie features a robust B-list cast: Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, Marley Shelton, Michael Biehn (pretty much M.I.A. since Aliens) and Freddy Rodriguez, to name a few (I won’t spoil the uncredited cameos).

McGowan plays a go-go dancer and aspiring stand-up comedienne who loses a leg in the onslaught and fights back with a prosthetic made out of a machine gun. She’s great, and Shelton is another particularly spirited standout. The movie definitely could stand to lose at least 15 minutes, and good lord is it ever nasty, but it’s pretty good trashy fun.

If Tarantino’s flick, Death Proof, had gone the same bloody, bawdy route, the three-hours-plus Grindhouse would have probably ended up as, well, kind of a grind. But it’s a different animal, more akin (and overtly so) to ’70s highway flicks like Vanishing Point. Kurt Russell, that eternal badass, plays Stuntman Mike, a friendly psychopath who likes to use his “death-proof” stunt car as a murder weapon.

The film starts with a near-half hour sequence where four gal pals hang out, talk about movies (in a classic Tarantino pop-cult style), drink, goof around and eventually run into Russell in a bar, with violent consequences. After that, the movie starts over again, with another four female friends (among them Rosario Dawson and Zoe Bell, the stuntwoman who stood in for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, playing herself—she’s a treat) hanging out and eventually encountering the deadly Stuntman. This time, things turn out quite differently.

In contrast to Planet Terror’s deliberately cheesy special effects, Death Proof features a long-form car chase finale that’s excellently choreographed, with unbelievable stunt work from Ball (you can tell she’s really doing what we’re seeing without overt CGI trickery, which is pretty wild). The movie’s structure is amazingly weird, but it’s definitely got Tarantino’s stamp all over the writing and directing. It’s a goof like Planet Terror, but a different kind of goof, and you have to wait a lot longer for the payoff than with Rodriguez’s movie, which starts with a jar of testicles and just gets more grotesque and hilarious from there. As a whole, Grindhouse is obviously, maybe deliberately, uneven, but it avoids tedious, homogenous thrills and should make for a fun night out, and the consistently strong female characterization is laudable. A flask of something strong is definitely a recommended viewing companion.

Grindhouse opens this Friday, April 6

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