Personally, I never heard of the term grindhouse until this movie came out (it was mentioned in the my recent Joe Bob Briggs’ book review and I still didn’t remember). In the Midwest, these movies were shown at drive-ins up to the early Eighties and sometimes HBO to fill time in the late evenings. Back when I lived in Champaign-Urbana, there was this older kid named Charlie who always managed to see such “classics” as The Car, It’s Alive, Food of the Gods and Shock Waves. He had everyone’s undivided attention as he retold the plots, gore and other great parts. Well the duo of QT and Rodriguez make their latest tribute to trash cinema through the double features of Grindhouse, complete with trailers, commercials, film scratches and conveniently “missing” reels. If you want the horrible smells, sticky floors and other unpleasantness associated with actual grindhouses, you’re on your own but I’m sure the dollar theater in Round Rock is pretty close.
The first feature is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. It’s really a knockoff of every other flesh-eating zombie movie ever since Romero’s 1968 original. What separates his from the pack is its general goofiness, especially Rose McGowan’s antics with her machine-gun limb and the ending. To me it was a more gruesome version of a personal favorite B Flick: Night of the Comet.
The second feature is Tarantino’s Death Proof. At first, it has a painfully slow start because the trio of women that begin the movie ramble on in Tarantino’s signature banter. This was amusing 15 years ago in Reservoir Dogs, it was tiresome by the third time I watched Pulp Fiction. Thankfully Kurt Russell finally shows up as the villain Stuntman Mike and demonstrates how he has more talent than the entire cast combined. The second half is another gaggle of women talking like Tarantino’s male characters but a car chase sequence compensates until the sudden ending.
If you don’t like the two movies within the movie, the four trailers (one at the beginning, three in the middle) are good for some laughs. I thought Don’t was the best one from the Shaun of the Dead people and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving slasher flick was spot on, right down to the scracthy-voiced announcer.
Despite all the intentional and unintentional flaws of Grindhouse, I can’t help but like it. I hope this movie succeeds too because if there’s a sequel, the production company should go with a different pair of directors who bring their own stories that fit the title’s theme.
In closing, if you live in a city with an Alamo Drafthouse, Grindhouse is best seen there. The people who run those theaters keep up the energy and excitement by showing additional trailers that inspired this. The funniest one was Night of the Lepus which is a movie I think that depended upon the audience’s ignorance of Latin for it to work. Their polite reminder of “don’t talk during the movie or else they’ll throw your ass out” was touching since it was former governor Ann Richards punishing the boorish offender.