GRINDHOUSE (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez
Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, Jeff Fahey,
Michael Parks, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt,
Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell,
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Freddy Rodriguez
With bullets flying and muscle cars ripping over country roads, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez lovingly recreate the experience of watching the kinds of grade-Z exploitation movies they grew up watching themselves. It's set up as a double feature, complete with trailers, scratched film stock and titles apologizing for missing reels. The Rodriguez feature comes first. It's called "Planet Terror", and it's a zombie movie whose high point comes when an amputee stripper played by Rose McGowan replaces her table-leg prosthesis with a machine gun. The co-hit (as they used to be billed at the drive-in) is Tarantino's "Death Proof", with Kurt Russell doing a dead-on self-parody as a tough-as-nails stuntman locked in a fender-smashing, gravel-spewing demolition race with a carload of women, one of them real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell. There might be a built-in limitation to what you can do with this material, but for anybody who ever spent a long summer evening watching movies through the windshield of a car at the Badger or the Big Sky or the Starlite 14, "Grindhouse" is a lot of fun. The made-up trailers include one for a hyperviolent thriller called "Machete", which became a real movie (and then a sequel) directed by Rodriguez and starring Danny Trejo. "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" were eventually released separately on video.
Michael Parks
(1940-2017)
