Death by Double Feature
OK, not really - 'Grindhouse' is a blast, but it does go on a bit too long
By Andy Klein
Grindhouse, in case you hadn't heard, is a mock double feature, designed to emulate/re-create/honor the sort of experiences Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino - the film's writer/producer/directors - had as teenagers, in downtown "grindhouse" theaters and drive-ins. The first half is Rodriguez's Planet Terror, essentially a zombie pic; the second half is Tarantino's Death Proof, which mixes elements of homicidal-stalker movies with car-chase flicks.
Those were but a few of the staple genres of the grindhouse experience. Going through my disturbingly thorough files and picking a random week (January 27-February 2, 1986), I see that the Metropolitan Theaters chain's Los Angeles Theater was showing Running Scared (big-budget studio cop flick), The Protector (Jackie Chan and Danny Aiello as cops), and 9 Deaths of the Ninja (ultra-low-budget American martial-arts film with Sho Kosugi). Similar triple bills were playing at Metropolitan's other downtown theaters - the Palace and the Tower - with the Cameo booking a "new" quadruple feature twice a week. ("New" goes in quotes because the prints were shuffled to and from its sister theaters, right down the street.) By the turn of the millennium, all of these downtown houses had either closed or stopped doing that kind of programming.
Planet Terror is about a small town near an army base where some sort of weird experiments are going on. After an unwise showdown between a corrupt scientist (Naveen Andrews) and an officer (Bruce Willis), a virus or a gas (or both) gets loose, causing an outbreak of ... something ... among the populace. This involves people's flesh rotting or turning into gooey pustules, plus instant zombification, with all the flesh-eating and brain-sucking that entails.
The resistance to this plague is led by a variety of over-the-top characters: tough guy Wray (Freddy Rodriguez); his ex, Cherry (Rose McGowan), a dancer, whose recovery from having one leg torn off is fast enough to enable her to take full advantage of the machine gun Wray has fastened onto her stump; Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) and her dad, ex-Sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, reprising his role from Kill Bill); and Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn).
There are all sorts of interesting issues involved in Rodriguez's decisions here: For instance, it's unlikely that any '70s zombie film would have had quite the level of grossness as Planet Terror (although Tarantino and Rodriguez are the guys who would know). But expectations have changed so much over the decades that a mere reproduction of 30-year-old makeup effects would seem ho-hum.
Also, to what degree does it make sense to reproduce the "bad" (that is, good bad) and the bad (that is, bad bad) aspects of those old films? Planet Terror is as ridiculously unreal as it gets - which is a part of the (good) bad. At points in both features, particularly around the reel changes, the directors have deliberately scratched and damaged the footage, in replication of a (bad) bad aspect of their models. In one of the project's best jokes, each film also has an intertitle card apologizing for a missing reel; the "missing" material in Planet Terror includes some crucial plot information that is only vaguely referenced later.
For the most part, Rodriguez chooses to reproduce the effect, rather than the particulars, of those old films. He cranks everything up to 11; the result is similar to the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn, stretched out to twice the length. Much of the shtick is wonderfully funny, particularly all the action choreography involving Cherry and her armed leg.
Still: Maybe I'm getting old, but the squickiness began to grate on me after a while. Even cleverly expressed, it managed to exhaust my "ewwww" reflex.
In terms of pacing, Tarantino's Death Proof is almost the opposite. Instead of keeping everything at top pitch from the start, Tarantino sets us up with more than a half hour of dialogue and low-key interaction before whomping us with an outburst of extreme violence exactly halfway through. Because of the slow setup, the violence is much more wrenching than in Planet Terror, even while it's far less gory.
Then the film does something of a reboot, with a second group of characters following the same pattern, except moving to the action part much faster. (I'm being vague, so as not to give away plot points.) Each of these climaxes involves car action; the final chase is truly spectacular, right up there with The French Connection and Bullitt.
Even though Death Proof is full of genre tropes, Tarantino is simply incapable of sticking to conventional narrative. (And I mean that as a compliment.) Except for his contribution to Four Rooms, this is his first film to be entirely chronological, but the two-part structure is still unusual; while it has similarities to a few horror films and perhaps to Ira Levin's novel A Kiss Before Dying, it's never been used in a car film. (Again, I expect someone to come up with an example I don't know about.)
I preferred Death Proof, partly because it's designed as an homage to stunt people in general and to Zoe Bell in particular. Bell doubled Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, having previously done the same for Lucy Lawless on Xena. Here, Tarantino has cast her as herself - a stuntwoman working on location. Unless Bell was totally acting in Double Dare - the wonderful 2004 documentary about her and veteran stuntwoman Jeannie Epper - she does a magnificent job of playing herself; and she's a character worth seeing. She's got a womanly body, an infectiously girlish energy, and an athletic skill-set that will make your eyes bug out. She's simply amazing in Death Proof's final chase. Tarantino seems to have designed the whole film to shout, "Hey! This is my pal Zoe! Isn't she fuckin' awesome?"
Well, yes, she is.
As for Grindhouse's shorter bits: It opens with a pretty funny fake trailer from Rodriguez for Machete, starring the wonderful Danny Trejo, who has been in almost all his features. (It's alleged that Machete may actually get made - a spinoff from a joke trailer!)
In between the features are faux trailers from Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Eli Roth (Hostel), and Rob Zombie. Zombie's entry - Werewolf Women of the SS, with Udo Kier - is simply hysterical.
Opinion is likely to be divided on which half is better. Yes, Rodriguez's is designed to be relentlessly entertaining (perhaps too relentless), where Tarantino goes for the slow build (perhaps too slow). The whole thing tops out at about three hours and 10 minutes; while this may mimic the sort of "bang for your buck" that grindhouses provided, it's a long time to sit. At a grindhouse, you could get up during intermission; but, at Grindhouse, the intermission is basically the trailers, which you wouldn't want to miss. As long as the filmmakers were incorporating the notion of missing reels, they could have made each feature 15 minutes shorter.
That such a move would have been better for the exhibitors is, for our purposes, irrelevant; but it also might have been better for the viewers.
Published: 04/05/2007
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