Grindhouse

This movie is fun all the way; it doesn't take anything about itself very seriously and is obviously meant to pay homage to a type of movie experience long forgotten. I just had a lot of fun watching the very dumb movies and fake trailers, it was a good time at the movies.

After a fake trailer for a fake revenge movie called Machete (Danny Trejo rocks!!) we see the 90 minute Planet Terror, a very B-zombie movie. We follow some small town folk, led by Freddy Rodriguez's Ray and Rose McGowan's (HOTTT!!!) Cherry. The movie features some laughable characters, sequences, events, and everything else you'd expect from a B-horror movie. But it's filled with recognizable faces like Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, and some others. Robert Rodriguez obviously had a lot of fun writing and directing this movie as he held very little back as far as cheesiness, explosions, and gimmicks - such as the machine gun as a leg prosthetic. The movie's filled with stuff like this.

Then comes some really funny and creative fake trailers from the likes of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth. You can't help but laugh and enjoy the likes of Werewolf Women of the S.S., Don't and Thanksgiving, all horror B movies.

The fake trailers are followed by Tarantino's Death Proof. It's about a killer who kills people with his "death proof" car, death proof for him, nobody else. This movie is slower and takes itself more seriously than Planet Terror. It's definitely a Tarantino movie with plenty of foot shots, long conversations about nothing, and several "car shots" are reminiscent of previous QT efforts. The features several uninteresting characters that talk too long and do very little. Two groups of women are stalked by Stuntman Mike, the psycho killer, but it stays too long on the women and not enough on my man Mike. The first half of the movie is a little more interesting as it builds to Mike's first onscreen kill. But the second half feature an even more uninteresting group of females and shows that Stuntman Mike, who was a badass up until he runs into these girls, is really a big whimp. The car killings and the car chase are pretty cool, but they don't take up much of the 90 minute runtime of the second feature of Grindhouse.

While the Tarantino's flick isn't nearly as fun as Rodriguez's, the entire effort of both and the others involved is comendible. I don't know much about grindhouses of back in the day, but this movie had "missing reels," were scratched up all to hell, and had the trailers before and in between. It really is a movie geek's movie and is a lot of fun watching how insanely bad the movie's really are.