The Grindhouse theme that plays through it is a great piece of music for this film as well, especially in the opening over Rose MacGowan's crying go-go dancing. I would also acknowledge that a lot of the comedy of Planet Terror would go better with an audience, and I saw it with one old guy who left early, which probably contributed to it feeling a little flat. The grindhouse conventions like the scratchy film print, dropped frames, burned and misaligned segments are entertaining, particularly one of the “missing reels” that contains major plot points and one character's entire backstory. Rodriguez generally does a pretty decent job of finding the golden mean between parody and homage that allows it to work both ways, so I have to give Rodriguez credit for that, since so many attempts fail.
Another grindhouse element I loved was the inclusion of fake trailers in the break between features. Here again I missed out, because I arrived too late for the first round of fake trailers, but the ones in between the double feature were one of the most memorable parts of the film, contributed by even more directors. “Don't” and “Thanksgiving... in theaters this Christmas” were both hilarious, and given Nicholas Cage's recent work he should definitely give some thought to doing a whole feature film as Fu Manchu. On the other hand, Rob Zombie's “Werewolf Women of the SS” did capture one grindhouse element that's missing from Planet Terror, and that's the exploitive, risible amount of sex and nudity that's in these trashy films. This is a problem of reproducing that genre with people who appear regularly in People magazine: I knew they'd have to tone it down once I saw who was in it, and it's obtrusive to recognize the camera tricks and careful positioning being used to obscure Rose MacGowan, and know that there's a “missing reel” joke coming up to protect her nipples. (I think Jessica Alba already has the pin-up girl tease schtick locked up in Hollywood these days.)
I really enjoyed Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, even though most people seemed to disagree. Death Proof is briefly the story of a serial killer with a tricked out stunt car named Stuntman Mike, played with a malevolent charm by Kurt Russel. It can be split into two sections, and each does have a very long set-up of girls cruising around town and talking... and talking... and this is where it seems to have lost a lot of the audience, especially coming on the heels of Planet Terror for an audience with full bladders and empty popcorn buckets. I thought it was great, the dialogue really sparkles the way it does in any Tarantino films, but it's also not bank robbers and murderers trying to verbally outmuscle each other, so it's something new from Tarantino, which is good since he just took the whole Italian film industry to task for making every movie about a married couple having a problem or mentally retarded people on vacation.
Vanessa Ferlito is fascinating as the sultry focus of the first part of Death Proof, and Rose MacGowan's brief appearance as the first body thrown under Stuntman Mike's wheels is pretty intense. It's a rare case of Tarantino doing more with less, hearkening back to an era of slasher films before the excess of Friday the 13th and others in the 80's, when one well-executed scene of murder and mayhem set a macabre, edgy tone over the rest of the film, like the first killings in Psycho or Halloween. Death Proof takes so long in creating real characters for Stuntman Mike to murder, and doesn't dispense with MacGowan's character casually, creating a real chill of horror, and Tarantino escalates this, using the entire first half of his film to establish for the audience that he will do very bad things to his people he's made us care about.
This makes the second half of the film an incredibly tense thrill ride, as cliche as that phrase may be, and after using the whole first half of the film as backstory on Stuntman Mike, so we'll know to shudder when we see him, in the second half of Death Proof I realized the entire movie for the first hour is all about one goal: setting up the greatest car chase ever. Tarantino needed a villain who was sufficiently evil to give it a real sense of jeopardy, he needed characters the audience would buy into, and a set-up and a setting that will feel real enough to keep it scary. He takes every last second he needs to introduce all the elements and gather them together, and it was well, well worth the wait. Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Rosario Dawson are a lot of fun to watch through the whole extended conversation that introduces their characters, particularly one scene of them all sitting around a table at a diner with the camera quietly moving around the table, until it catches a glimpse of Stuntman Mike's jacket at the counter, and this sense of doom settles in. The whole film is full of humor, intriguing characters with sparkling dialogue, and all leads to this incredible chase scene with Zoe Bell rolling around on the hood of a car for the whole thing. Seriously, well worth the wait, about the most invested I've been in a chase scene since the Dukes of Hazzard were on the air, and the way Kurt Russell and these women unravel the whole thing to April March's circa 1960's French Ye-Ye pop cover “Hang Up the Chick Habit” is just fantastic.
So I hope intelligent, sophisticated people will with a certain penchant for trashy cinema will give Death Proof a try, even if just to find out who killed Bin Laden... actually that was revealed in Planet Terror.
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