“Car accident,” “zombie,” “scar,” “machine gun,” “amputee,” “machete,” “gore,” and “limb.” Shout-outs from a particularly horrific game of charades? No, they’re selections from the Internet Movie Database’s list of “plot keywords” for the movie Grindhouse, and they’re a pretty fair indicator of what you’ll find in film, a double-feature throwback to the coarse, dirt cheap exploitation flicks that played in dingy downtown theaters in the 1970s. Directed by two titans of trash cinema, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, these two feature-length films (which come complete with the delightfully cheeseball titles Planet Terror and Death Proof), collectively serve as a send-up, homage, parody, and celebration of the proudly rude movies that made no bones about getting right to the meat of their grisly genre kicks — and flaying it in a dozen different ways while doing so.
And for hardened grindophiles, the kind of guys (and yes, they’re mostly guys) who live to see pole-dancers with machine guns for legs, boil-covered mutant zombies, or Kurt Russell as a sleazy, psychopathic stunt-car driver, there are meaty chunks of puerile glory dispersed throughout. But the creators are so blinded by their slobbering geek love for these crass old pics that they can’t decide whether they want Grindhouse to be a parody, a contemporary update, a post-modern experiment, or a loving recreation. What should’ve been a gleefully vulgar, low-brow romp is, instead, as awkward and mangled as one of Rodriguez’s zombies — not without its share of bizarre thrills and gurgling menace — but plodding, confused, struggling to hold itself together.
Rodriguez and Tarantino are the kings of the video-store geeks, gonzo auteurs of brutal pulp and noir. Rodriguez is mostly an imitator, one who, as with Sin City and Desperado, often manages to supercharge grisly, juvenile material with a brain-fried energy. He’s often a good one, though; his best work makes you feel good about feeling dumb. Tarantino, on the other hand, is a genuine talent, a walking, talking encyclopedia of the glories of gutter cinema with a gift for hipster dialog and urban dialects. Like a kid who can walk into a junky thrift store and put together a dozen eye-catching outfits, his genius is sifting through the detritus of cinematic history and rebuilding the pieces into surprisingly effective genre film mash-ups.
Last time these two directorial terrors got together was with the Tarantino-written, Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn, a messy, screwball horror film about a pair of gangsters who kidnap a priest and his family and end up in a grungy strip club populated by vampires. It gave us the best of both worlds: Rodriguez took Tarantino’s insane script and gave it a manic b-horror treatment that featured, among its many highlights, a disheveled Harvey Keitel declaring, “I’m a mean mother****ing servant of God,” and a heavily tattooed George Clooney (in his first major big-screen role) wielding a shotgun cross. In other words, it was exactly as ludicrous, awesome, and — to be totally clear — truly terrible as a movie about a priest, a gangster, and a strip club full of vampires should be.
So it’s surprising and disappointing that Grindhouse only occasionally reaches the inspired heights of outrageous badness of From Dusk Till Dawn. Rodriguez’s movie, Planet Terror, runs first on the bill, and it’s by far the weaker film. It’s a flesh-eating zombie movie in the style of early 80s John Carpenter, except without any of Carpenter’s subtlety. To summarize the plot would be futile, but it involves Bruce Willis as a military commander infected with a zombie-creating bioagent, Naveen Andrews (otherwise known as the guy who plays Sayid on Lost) as a gun-toting scientist/rebel, a nurse with paralyzed wrists, a stubborn Texas barbeque restaurant owner, and, not to be missed, the aforementioned stripper with the machine-gun leg. Faces boil, body parts get thrashed and slashed, zombies chomp on flesh, and pretty much everything in the movie explodes or bleeds at some point. You may even experience this in the audience, as it’s likely that you’ll feel as if your brain is melting out your ears from overexposure to carnage.
Right now you’re either thinking, “Ewww, that’s awful,” or, “Waittaminute, sounds like Planet Terror’s got the goods.” If you’re in the “Ewww” crowd, I can’t help you. Go rent Notting Hill or something with talking animals. For the rest of you sickos, well, it’s true that Rodriguez throws out enough mayhem that he sometimes hits the mark: It’s tough to beat a pack of rabid zombies on a tarmac being mowed down by a whirling helicopter blade, or the heroes stumbling upon the barbeque joint owner lying on the ground with his guts hanging out — only to find out that it’s just Texas BBQ-style sausage links.
But the scattered plot makes caring about the proceedings a chore, and the tonal shifts — from goofy, slapstick-style parody to grim-and-gruesome violence to listless, boring exposition — grind things to a halt on several occasions. A movie like this doesn’t need exposition at all, and Rodriguez seems determined to film these scenes in the same halting, poorly scripted, monotonously acted style of the films he’s imitating. Sometimes Planet Terror plays like Red Bull-powered psycho parody, and when it does, it’s glorious trash. But too often Rodriguez chooses to un-self-consciously imitate the parts of the bad old exploitation flicks that made them, well, bad.
Tarantino’s film, Death Proof, isn’t half as gaga for gore, and though it’s too long, it’s a far better film. It’s structured in two parts: In the first half hour, four young women go out to a bar and are stalked by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a loner with a scar and a skull-painted 70s muscle car rigged to protect its driver from even the most violent smash up. In the second part, Mike seeks out new victims, but unlike the first set, they aren’t helpless hotties: Two of them happen to be professional stunt drivers. Pistons pump, hoods smash, and plenty of dust gets kicked into the air as Mike and his intended victims take to the road.
Even with Tarantino’s record for casting brilliance, getting Kurt Russell to play the role of a homicidal stunt-car driver was a stroke of genius. Russell broods and pouts and leers, part pathetic old man, part hot-tempered psychopath, all creep. For the two sets of female characters, Tarantino cooks up a stew of his trademark pop-culture laden existential dialog. No doubt, the man has an ear for the rhythm of speech, but not all of his actresses can handle it, and many scenes drag on too long. He almost makes up for this, though, with the speed-freak mania of his final chase car chase. It’s a howling maelstrom of engine roar and crumpled, muscle-car metal — a delirious, death-defying showcase for old-school man-(and woman)-on-car stunt-work.
Grindhouse might’ve worked better had its two features, both of which run about 90 minutes, been as freewheeling with hacking off film as with body parts. It’s a film that works best in short, bloody bursts, as demonstrated by the fake movie trailers shown at the beginning and in between the films. In these, we get a holiday-themed slasher film called Thanksgiving, a madhouse action picture starring Danny Trejo named Machete, a foreign import titled Don’t!, and a movie that needs no description, Werewolf Women of the SS. We don’t need to see these as actual, full-length movies; the 90-second trailers tell us everything we need to know (and, true to gut-mangling form, at lot no normal person should want to). For lovers of demented and shocking trash cinema, there are plenty of gruesome goodies to be found in Grindhouse, but Rodriguez and Tarantino dole out more abuse than their concept, or their audience, should have to endure.