Grindhouse

Every fan-boy’s wet dream—that is if you’re a fan of 70’s exploitation trash, and more specifically, if you’re Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Any connoisseur of cinema would become easily enthralled by the sheer childlike love both filmmakers feel for the medium, and the entire double-feature experience is a brilliantly retro time-travel trip that had me glued to the screen (yet most American audiences obviously weren’t in on the joke—making the whole cinematic experiment a box-office bomb).

Though most critics sneer at Rodriguez’s utter obsession with spectacle, I’d argue his half (Planet Terror) is far and away the more successful of the two: it’s an exhilarating satirical homage that makes an art form out of Grade-Z moviemaking—every filmic jump, scratch, hair, blur, and missing reel is so lovingly painted on the screen that it left me feeling gloriously high on the sheer thrill of the cinematic experience.

This is usually the feeling I get from Tarantino’s work, yet his segment (Death-Proof) doesn’t subvert the grind-house genre so much as re-create it. That’s a decided letdown, considering Tarantino has made a career out of subverting trash genres—breathing innovative life and human complexity into heist pictures (Reservoir Dogs), pulp fiction (Pulp Fiction), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), and every revenge genre you can name (Kill Bill). Yet Death-Proof simply assembles the elements of a sleazy exploitation flick like I Spit on Your Grave, such as mind-numbingly dull dialogue passages, cardboard personalities, and inexplicable shifts in character motivation.

Yes, it’s a successful recreation, but it bears the question, “What’s the point?” None of the characters are remotely involving, with the exception of Kurt Russell, having a blast playing a variation of his iconic badass role. There’s an excellent car chase, an unforgettably brutal car crash, and a few laughs and thrills to be had, yet it’s a damned shame that Tarantino couldn’t have done more with it.

Probably the greatest highlight of the Grindhouse experience is the archival footage of advertisements and other footage book-ending the films. There are also some wonderful fake trailers of other exploitation pictures, which probably generate the biggest laughs of all. There’s Rodriguez’s explosive Machete, Rob Zombie’s sloppy Werewolf Women of the S.S., Edgar Wright’s marvelous Don’t (a satire of breathlessly incomprehensible trailers, narrated by Will Arnett), and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (a pitch-perfect parody of slasher films that’s arguably the best of the bunch). Overall, this is a flawed yet supremely enjoyable ode to the junky beauty and one-of-a-kind thrills only found in a Grindhouse theater.

Rating: **** (out of *****)