A Night at the GrindHouse - A Movie Review

The lights go down and the projector starts to flicker. Soon I was to go on an adventure of tremendous proportions, an adventure down the dark back roads of a small town in Texas through guts, gore, destruction, pain, and death. A three hour and fifteen minute thrill ride of a double bill the likes of which have not been seen in many years. And apparently I was one of the fifteen people to see GrindHouse on its premier weekend.

In this double bill Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino team up to pay worship to the splatter fest of seventies horror by independently writing and directing two horror films and piecing them together with fake movie trailers as the cartilage. The resulting is an epic three hour and fifteen minute long gore-a-thon mixed with tongue-in-cheek humor, over the top characters, and killer performances by a cast of all stars. But because it is two movies in one unavoidably everyone who goes to see it comes out with the same question, which one was better? For the most part the answer is Tarantino's.

The first movie was Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror; an action packed new age zombie kill fest which only takes time out from the action to hit the audience with its wicked humor. Planet Terror is full of over the top characters some cliché like the grizzled old sheriff who never trusts the main hero, and some iconic like the heroine with a machine gun for a leg. The problem with this film is in its unbalanced approach to the genre. While the first half of Planet Terror acts as homage to the grind house films the second half becomes a flat out spoof of the genre never missing an opportunity to poke fun at itself. It could have been a beautiful mix of the two but since one was played so straight and the other so comically they work in opposition of each other rather than together. Still a pretty good horror film it just leaves you wanting a little.

The second part of the double feature is Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof a psycho killer thrill ride infused with Tarantinoesque conversational character pieces. Let me say right off the back if you like Tarantino you will love this movie. Stuntman Mike, played terrifically by Kurt Russell, is a psychotic killer who murders with his death proof stunt car that is until one group of girls he was hunting turns the table on him and he becomes the hunted. I loved this film but it must be said that there are some problems with it. The first of which is that Tarantino's dialogue runs on for a little too long. We already know the point of the conversation and they continue to double talk over each other creating a lot of useless filler. Usually Quentin's dialogue is a mosaic beautifully painting its way to a satisfying conclusion but this time the dialogue bumps into itself so much that it becomes tedious. I also had problems with the way the last act played out Stuntman Mike seems to turn into a completely different character and a bit of a p*$$3y. Also, Warning Spoilers, the girls completely escape from harm and as a note Tarantino himself gave to Eli Roth on the movie 'Hostel' (to paraphrase from the commentary track) "None of this getting away unharmed b.s. he should be scarred forever" and this is simply avoided by letting Zoe live in Death Proof, End of Spoilers.

Despite a few shortcomings and the intimidating runtime Grindhouse still holds enough punch to knock you on your @$$. Make sure you get the chance to see it before Harvey Weinstein cuts it into two and you'll have to pay double to see it all, let's also hope they keep the movie together when it goes on DVD.