CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 04/06/07

One Man's Trash
Is Another Man's Treasure

By bart davis

Indie pioneers-turned-mainstream pulp merchants, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino team up for a double-feature homage to the schlock of their youth with Grindhouse. Rodriguez brings the zombies, babes, and gore in Planet Terror, while Tarantino rolls up with a psychotic stunt driver stalking nubile chicks in Death Proof. Both writers couldn't be more comfortable in their chosen milieus, and the result is three glorious hours of brazenly amoral entertainment—replete with four trailers for so-far fake coming attractions.

Grindhouse (Planet Terror, Death Proof)

Planet Terror—Robert Rodriguez (also directed)
Death Proof—Quentin Tarantino (also directed)

Trailers:
* Werewolf Women of the S.S.—Rob Zombie (also directed)
* Untitled (see below)—Edgar Wright (also directed)
* Thanksgiving—Eli Roth (also directed)
* Machete—Robert Rodriguez (also directed)

Any danger of Grindhouse descending into posturing or mere gimmickry is dashed the moment Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror kicks into gear with its tightly structured tale of a military-devised virus released into the air stream of a small Texas town by a shadowy contractor, Abby (Naveen Andrews), who's been double-crossed by a renegade group of soldiers led by Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis). As the viewer soon discovers, the virus transforms regular folk into flesh-eating zombies, which means a whole heap of bloody trouble for those who, for the time being, remain uninfected.

Rodriguez has essentially written Planet Terror as an ensemble piece, and it's actually kind of remarkable how he finds time for colorful bits of character development while driving the story forward at a breakneck pace. The protagonists of the story are the dashing recidivist criminal Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and his go-go dancing girlfriend Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), who's ready to give up swinging around a pole in various stages of undress for stand-up comedy. At the beginning of the film, the pair are at a crossroads: Cherry's angry with Wray because he's unreliable; Wray seems peeved with Cherry because she stole his motorcycle jacket. But before they have a chance to properly reconcile, they're both attacked by a marauding gang of zombies, who gnaw off one of Cherry's legs. Wray rushes Cherry to the local hospital and immediately becomes suspect number one in the eyes of Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn), a hardass obsessed with driving his brother, J.T. (Jeff Fahey), out of the barbecue business because he won't share his successful recipe.

The hospital is also home to one of Planet Terror's other main characters, Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton), who's in the process of leaving her sadistic husband, Dr. Bill Block (Josh Brolin), for another woman. When that other woman shows up dead on a slab at the emergency room, Bill suspects Dakota was getting back together with her. But before Bill can finish torturing the truth out of Dakota, the zombies take over the hospital, at which point Planet Terror finds fifth gear and hurtles the audience into one gory action set-piece after another.

What's most amazing about Rodriguez's script, aside from the fact that he's finally written a good one front-to-back, is that its structure remains perfect even after he cuts out 20 minutes of narrative with a missing-reel gag. What's brilliant about this is that he's only lost a sex scene and a load of exposition: in other words, Rodriguez has circumnavigated the "second-act sag". When the story picks back up, there are numerous references to things learned from that reel, but, because this is a formula action/horror movie, the viewer instinctively knows precisely what those twists and reveals were. This is clever writing, and it sets a giddy tone for the mayhem-heavy third act.

Planet Terror is such a high-octane thrill ride that the viewer needs time to catch their breath in between features, which is why the boys have enlisted some of their writer-director pals to craft a few trailers for fake features. Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects) goes the Nazisploitation route with Werewolf Women of the S.S., Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) fires off a parody of European horror repackaged for the American market (and the title is the punch line, so let's not spoil it here), while Eli Roth (Hostel) indulges in some full-blown splatter with Thanksgiving.

With the pallet properly cleansed, Tarantino's Death Proof idles onto the screen and employs a much more deliberate setup that's a nice contrast to Planet Terror, provided one has a taste for tangential girl talk. Following three women—D.J. Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier), Shanna (Jordan Ladd), and Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito)—as they make plans to go out drinking and flirt with guys before heading out to a cabin at Lake LBJ, the script should be setting up like a random slasher flick. But when has Tarantino ever written a strict genre piece? Though honoring the conventions of the slasher movie, which were pretty much all filler until it came time to kill of the characters one by one, Tarantino invests his filler with genuine affection for the doomed girls. Once he gets his dramatis personae ensconced at a roadside dive, Tarantino decides—to the great frustration of viewers expecting a straight-up slasher homage—that he'd rather slow the film down and hang out at the bar for a while.

It's at the bar where the girls encounter the killer, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), who's first seen cramming handfuls of disgustingly sloppy nachos into his mouth as he keeps a sinister eye on his prey. But the longer Tarantino keeps the action confined to the bar, the more he seems to enjoy writing for Mike; pretty soon, it's impossible to despise anyone in the film save for the horny dudes (Eli Roth and Michael Bacall) plotting to drink the girls into a more permissive mindset.

When Tarantino finally gets the girls on the road, Death Proof briefly roars to life as an excruciatingly tense horror film. But after a terribly brutal car wreck, Tarantino downshifts the tone again, and starts following another group of girls being targeted by Stuntman Mike. And —guess what—he falls in love with them, too! Tarantino may be sacrificing narrative momentum by indulging in these character detours, but he does so trusting that the viewer knows he's going to deliver the goods soon enough. Structurally, Tarantino is breaking the rules with this counterintuitive two-act setup, but there's something liberating about it, too. Genres as rigidly formulaic as slasher movies almost demand experimentation nowadays, and it's positively inspiring to watch Tarantino work this deeply character-based variation. Working within an established framework has never appealed to Tarantino, and, hopefully, it never will. By looking backward for inspiration, he's moving the medium forward.

Conventional and groundbreaking in equal measure, Robert Rodriguez's and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse succeeds brilliantly as a plain old-fashioned good time at the movies and a daring reworking of genre.

Grindhouse

The Weinstein Company
Rated R; 140 min.

Buy tickets now

Bart Davis is an entertainment writer living and working in his native Los Angeles.

Grindhouse courtesy the Weinstein Company

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