Tarantino's Half of Grindhouse on Shaky Foundation

Grindhouse is 55% of an excellent movie, five-stars, A+, however you want to grade a movie. Tarantino doesn't hold up his end of the bargin (big surprise).

The execution behind the concept is outstanding. It's apparent that everyone behind this was fully committed to the concept, because the look, feel, and dialouge are exactly what you would find in grindhouse movies. I was afraid that this would tip over into parody, or would pull its punches by going soft, but it doesn't. If you are a fan of this stuff, see this. Leave your women at home, or let them tee-hee at Blades of Glory and leave the kids at Firehouse Dog. If you're not a fan of this stuff, you might as well see Blades of Glory as you are not going to get numerous references to the grindhouse genre. Maybe you and the Mrs. can split a giant popcorn as Will Ferrell hams it up yet again.

Planet Terror is a fantastic recreation. Most everyone thinks of this as a horror film. It's not, but that is the shorthand that everyone understands. More appropriately, it is a zombie-apocalypse film that has more in common with Night of the Living Dead that a straight out horror film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Quick aside: if you don't understand why the film 28 Days sucked, you need to see Planet Terror and compare the two. And keep in mind that 28 Days totally ripped of the plot of the excellent book Day of the Triffids.)

There are also a series of trailers and other commercials, bumpers, and other various items. These trailers are fakes, but they look better than 98% of the movies made these days. Each of these trailers have their own in-jokes. You have probably heard about Thanksgiving and the Nazi werewolf movie, but the best trailer is for a horror movie. The title of the movie is a pitch-perfect joke, so I won't give it away. And the little bits announcing the movie's rating were also priceless.

So that is 55% of the movie. And after you are presented with this, you have to sit through Tarantino's Death Proof. I wish I could say this movie is snore-proof.

Death Proof is a car chase car crash movie (or it's two halves of a car chase movie, but more on that later). That was never my type of movie, but that is not why I disliked it. Here is why I disliked it.

1. It's a boring car crash movie.
2. The reason it's a boring car crash movie is that Tarantino, even though he is making a homage to a certain type of film, still has to make everyone know it's a Tarantino movie.
3. To accomplish this, we sit through minutes and minutes of quixotic Tarantino dialogue that never advances the plot. Almost all of this dialogue comes before any major action, so you sit around for a long time waiting for anything to happen. (This type of slowness would never be tolerated in a real grindhouse film. Compare this script to Planet Terror, where, even though the plot is purposefully jumbled, the script actually movies the plot along and keeps things in order). Here is what I got out of Tarantino's script. He likes Vanishing Point. A lot.
4. Since the movie itself was boring, I paid more attention to the stuntwork, which, to be fair, was outstanding. This is not CGI "Let's make it look like an elf is flying a dragon to the moon" shit. These stunts look legitimately dangerous.

Now to the "two halves" comment. Death Proof looks like two different movies, with the only connection being "Stuntman Mike". It was common in the grindhouse era to take parts of two different movies and cobble them together into one movie. If someone shot 30 minutes of a failed project, and someone had 60 minutes of a movie but needed to add a little extra, they would make a deal and take what they needed of the 30 minutes and interject it into the 60 minutes. If you ever saw Make Them Die Slowly, it's obvious that some of that footage either came from stock film or someone's failed film.

At the beginning of Death Proof, a title of another movie briefly flashes onscreen before it is completely covered over by the title for Death Proof. Was Tarantino the conceptualist specifically making a movie that is supposed to be cobbled from two movies? If so, the fact that his typical dialogue is found in each "movie" ruins the concept.

If you are as bored as I was at Death Proof, feel free to leave anytime. There are no more cool trailers at the end of the movie.

Grindhouse is loaded with fleeting images and other things that slip quickly by when you see this in a theater. Wait until the DVD comes out, and ever frame can be stopped and obsessed over. I hope they give a separate DVD release for Planet Terror.

Sunday Supplement

Click on the title to find an awesome blog that deals with 80's music, especially hard to find remixes.

I still haven't seen Grindhouse. It is proving hard to find the time to squeeze in seeing a 191 minute movie. But that last posting on movies got me thinking about the movies I have seen and half-remembered, so that led to me looking for sites that dealt with grindhouse/horror movies.

As you can guess, there are many of them. And they have been very helpful, as I can now put titles to movies, and remember/find out endings I may have missed.

So here is a website to check out. Please Ignore the Dust While there are website with far more comprehensive lists, the reviews here are detailed. The writer has an odd writing style that I originally found off-putting, then it grew on me.

And for anyone looking for a little Pittsburgh related horror nostalgia, you can't beat this. Welcome To Chiller Theater Memories!