Grindhouse
****
Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Rosario Dawson
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Rated R
Opens Friday
Opening a movie entitled Grindhouse in thousands of multiplexes across the country is a bit like launching a mall-anchor fast-food chain and calling it Hole in the Wall. Clearly, any film that features a national advertising campaign and scores an Entertainment Weekly cover has betrayed the threadbare, disreputable ethos of genuine grindhouse fare. (Inevitable, really, now that Times Square, where the grindhouse once reigned, has become home to Chevy’s and the Disney Store.) More ironic still, however, is the notion that fast-buck sleaze is a genre in need of resuscitation. If you really want to see the kind of cheerfully slapdash, aggressively Neanderthal popcorn-muncher that used to play in double bills starting at 3 a.m., just wait for the next entry in the Saw series. Even an alleged historical drama like 300, adapted from an acclaimed graphic novel and made with the latest in digital technology, is essentially a grindhouse flick writ large: Fill a big empty room with bad actors in skimpy costumes and then see how many gruesome impalements and eviscerations you can squeeze into two hours.
Thing is, though, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who collaborated on Grindhouse, aren’t really interested in making schlock. Instead, this three-hour double feature lovingly re-creates a moribund moviegoing experience, providing younger audiences—anyone under 40, pretty much—with a simulacrum of Z-grade escapism from the era before home video. Both films have been artificially damaged to resemble prints that have already spooled through the projector 500 times or more—the cinematic equivalent of adding some vinyl pop ’n’ crackle to make your otherwise pristine CD sound more old-school. Entire reels have allegedly gone missing, so that the action abruptly jumps ahead 15 minutes (to hilarious effect) right at the most exciting part. Tarantino has dug up more of the vintage interstitial material that he used to decorate Kill Bill (which was far more influenced by grindhouse movies than is his contribution here), and directors Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Eli Roth (Hostel) have contributed trailers for nonexistent horror films. Grindhouse isn’t so much a movie as it is an elaborate fake museum, an ardent exercise in grubby nostalgia.
There’s a “problem,” however: Both Rodriguez and Tarantino have turned in excellent work, films several orders of magnitude more sophisticated and accomplished than anything you’d likely have found at the drive-in. Planet Terror, Rodriguez’s zombie flick, superficially resembles a routine Romero knockoff, serving up absurd images that make more sense on a poster than in the narrative (e.g. Rose McGowan’s machine-gun leg) and reveling in crude, juvenile humor (one human villain collects the severed testicles of his victims, frequently holding his prizes aloft in a huge plastic bag). But the plainspoken yet eccentric characters—particularly Freddy Rodriguez’s quietly badass hero, known as El Wray, and a grizzled barbecue owner played by Jeff Fahey—feel like refugees from an early John Carpenter film, and Rodriguez augments the homage by borrowing Carpenter’s vivid and muscular compositional style. Outrageously entertaining, gloriously stupid, Planet Terror falters—more irony—only when Tarantino turns up in a significant supporting role, still under the sorely mistaken impression that he can act.
But lord-a-mercy can the dude write and direct. Death Proof, featuring Kurt Russell as a homicidal stunt-car driver who targets young women, may be the most structurally audacious movie since ... well, I can’t say which all-time classic, as that would spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that no actual grindhouse film has ever been remotely this ambitious, nor toyed as masterfully with an audience’s expectations. Working with an almost exclusively female cast—Russell has limited screen time, though he makes the oily most of it—Tarantino composes long, vulgar, ludicrously digressive arias (performed with flair by Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Tamiia Poitier and others)—an endless stream of words expressly designed to be punctuated by blunt, horrific action. Death Proof builds to a truly hair-raising car chase, but the movie as a whole will be most appreciated by film buffs who recognize the genre conventions Tarantino so flagrantly subverts. If the average grindhouse flick had possessed even half this much wit and imagination, we’d have something worth lamenting.