Quentin Tarantino seems to be one of the few directors who almost escapes unscathed whenever he makes a movie. I say “almost” because no one is perfect and even though he can come off as pompous and arrogant, I think Tarantino would say he’s not perfect. For a man who’s won two Oscars for writing, he admits he can only type with one finger.
Yet, in the spring of 2007, Tarantino and his Robert Rodriguez (the ying to his yang), were going to release a movie experience that brought back to the love of going to the movies. I admit, the 2000s weren’t the best time for American cinema. I don’t know if it was the aftermath of 9/11 or being in two wars with a very unpopular President in the White House. Following The Lord of the Rings trilogy, most moviegoers weren’t looking forward to what was being churned out.
I mean, seriously, this was Matthew McConaughey’s himbo phase. Then, there were all those gorno horror movie franchises (Saw, Hostel). And then there those dance movies like You Got Served, So You Think You Can Dance, Honey, Step Up and Stomp the Yard. The superhero genre was still undetermined following some disappointments like Daredevil, Catwoman and Superman Returns. Even Snakes on a Plane had been a let down despite so much build-up. Then, you had movies that sounded like they belonged in the X-rated version of the video stores (Blow, House of D, A Love Song for Bobby Long, Skins).
So, maybe Tarantino and Rodriguez should’ve second-guessed if the American public was going to care about movies that were a throwback to the 1970s exploitation era. Most of the people who enjoyed these movies were well into their 40s and 50s by 2007. And most of these movies played in cheap theaters at a huge discount. Expecting people to spend about three and a half hours at a movie theater was a huge risk.
But another thing that Tarantino and Rodriguez either forgot about or did intentionally – most of these cheap movies were horribly made and were duds. This is why they mostly played to theaters where the soft drinks are served flat and you might find penicillin on the candy. Grindhouse was produced with a budget of $53-67 million. It only made $25 million.
Grindhouse has two features in it. The first is Planet Terror written and directed by Rodriguez. It’s a zombie outbreak movie in which a military science experiment results in infected people escaping and terrorizing a nearby Texas small town. Rodriguez doesn’t add anything knew to the format but he does make it one helluva ride.
Dr. John “Abby” Abbington (Naveen Andrews) causes the release of the toxin DCW2 that infects people as evil Army Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) and his squad need to find a cure. In the nearby town, Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) is a go-go dancer who wants to be a stand-up comic who bumps into her old flame “El Wray” (Freddy Rodriguez) at a barbecue diner run by J.T. Hague (Jeff Fahey).
They leave town in his truck but don’t get far when they run off the road when the infected rush out on the road. They take Cherry but he’s able to stop them but her right leg below the knee is torn off. They go to the nearby hospital where Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) is working the night shift with his wife, Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton). However, Dakota is planning to escape town herself with her lover, Tammy Visan (Stacy Ferguson), who was recently killed by the infected not far from the wreck.
More and more infected people keep coming into hospital as the local sheriff’s department is dealing with crazies themselves. The local sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn) has a previous beef with Wray that is never fully explained. It doesn’t need to be. Most of these movies have law enforcement who overstepped their authorities and gruff hard-asses like Wray who weren’t so easily intimidated.
Eventually it turns into another typical zombie movie as the infected commit gruesome murders and the survivors shoot their way out of it. Some of the deaths are intended to look cheap such as when a paramedic is eaten alive by zombies, you can clearly see his rib cage is is cheap foam prosthetic. Stuntwoman/actress Zoe Bell plays one of the zombies.
Rodriguez has always been a director who mainly focused on style other than substance. And here he provides a fun horror-comedy where Cherry has a machine gun with grenade launcher attached to her stump. How is she able to shoot it? It doesn’t really matter.
This is one of the few times when Tarantino pops up in an acting role, his need to overact is crucial. He plays Lewis, the military personnel second in command who attempts to sexually assault Cherry and Dakota when they are taken into custody. He hams it up horribly. And knowing now what we know about Harvey Weinstein, who was one of the producers, you can see the parallel with his character.
Rodriguez was dating McGowan at the time who had told people about Weinstein and his sleazy predatory behavior. As Cherry shoots all the misogynistic evil military officials, it’s like she’s getting revenge on all the Weinsteins out there. And Lewis himself meets one of the worse fates of all the people in the movie. But he really does deserve it.
The casting of Willis was an in-joke that ironically would become a staple of his career later. Most of these exploitation movies would pay big money to a famous name or A-lister who usually filmed all their scenes in 1-2 days. Most of the scenes were shown with the top celebrity talking to other characters off-screen who clearly weren’t in the same room with them. Even though he is shown interacting with many characters, Muldoon is hardly ever in the same frame with the other characters. This would be how he would make movies later in his career.
Planet Terror is preceded by a fake trailer Machete in which Danny Trejo plays the titular character who seeks revenge against the evil people who double-crossed him. Fahey also appears in the trailer along with Cheech Marin as a gun-toting priest. The popularity of the trailer would lead for Rodriguez to make the real movie released in 2010. Trejo, Fahey and Marin all reprised their roles with Robert DeNiro, Lindsay Lohan, Shea Willingham, Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez joining the cast. (Rumor has it that Rodriguez filmed almost a complete movie and had to whittle it down. He ended up using some of these scenes in the movies to keep the production schedule and costs down.)
Machete was more successful than both Grindhouse and the extended version of Planet Terror that was released. It grossed $45.5 million. When it was released individually, it only made $11.4 million worldwide. Death Proof fared better when it was released individually as it grossed $31.1 million. However, I prefer Planet Terror over Death Proof.
My main complaint with Death Proof is Tarantino has a great premise but it’s a sloppy movie. Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike McKay, an aging Hollywood stuntman who uses his old-model cars to kill women he obsesses over. It’s a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, most of the movie features one-dimensional women characters sitting around in bars and restaurants talking.
Tarantino does pull an Alfred Hitchcock/Janet Leigh twist by killing off the characters we’ve been following for the first third of the movie. They include Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito), Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier) and Shanna (Jordan Ladd), who are heading out to a lake house for the weekend when they stop at a bar in the Austin, Texas area. They see Mike there as they talk with him and others.
I can tell what Tarantino is doing. He’s setting up the gruesome murders that come later to make the audience care more about it. Also at the bar is Pam (McGowan) who ends up taking a ride in Mike’s death proof car but seeing that he has no intention of taking her home. Mike crashes into the car the woman are in but is the only one who survives. Because he wasn’t shown drinking at the bar, there’s no reason the police think he was drunk.
More than a year later, Mike has healed from his wounds and moved east toward Lebanon, Tenn., east of Nashville. He’s got his interest on a new group of women who are working for a movie that is filming nearby. Abernathy Ross (Rosario Dawson) is a hairstylist/cosmetologist. Lee Montgomery (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a young aspiring actress. Kim Mathis (Tracie Thoms) and Zoe Bell (as herself) are part of the stunt crew.
Zoe tells them she’s found an ad for a 1970 white Dodge Challenger the same used in the movie Vanishing Point. The seller lives nearby. And her and Kim want to take it out for some stunt driving. They’re able to convince the owner to let them drive it but then they are followed by Mike who tries to run them off the road. This sequence of the movie is the best. Using practical effects including Zoe who is actually on the hood of the Challenger trying to hold on for dear life as it speeds is thrilling.
However, only about a third of the feature is exciting. Many critics have pointed to this being Tarantino’s worst movie. And I agree. In many ways, it plays more like it should be in an anthology. All the expository dialogue that takes up the rest of the movie is dull and boring. It doesn’t help that the character of Kim is a stereotype of the angry black woman and Thoms overacts so much. Dawson is so little used in what is mostly a supporting role even though she was heavily advertised as a lead in the promotions.
Russell gives a great performance playing the villain. He pays Mike as a schlub who knows the younger people are laughing at him behind his back. And he understands what’s needed to play the role. Tarantino has said that he is proud of this movie because of the intended audience liked it. But when you’re making B-movie homages to people expecting A-plus entertainment, you’re going to get people who don’t fully understand the material. He recently praised Willis’ performance in the exploitation thriller Deadlock saying it was enjoyable for what it was.
I’m not really sure if a movie like this was put out today people would be any more enthusiastic. One of the major criticism of movies nowadays is they’re too long. It’s been reported that after Planet Terror, people were leaving the theaters only to be stopped by workers telling them there was another feature.
In between the features are fake trailers by Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie and Eli Roth. Wright pays homage to the gruesome British haunted horror movies with Don’t. Nick Frost who is a regular collaborator actor appears as Will Arnett does the voice-over. If you understand what Wright is doing, the intention is great. If you don’t, it still looks like a creepy scary movie.
Zombie has a short trailer called Werewolf Women of the S.S. which is an absurd homage to the Nazisploitation movies. The title is a play on the infamous Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. The plot is about Nazis turning people into werewolves or something. Featured in the trailer are Udo Kier, Sybel Danning, Tom Towles, Bill Moseley, and of course, Sherri Moon Zombie. But the weirdest cameo may come from Nicolas Cage who appears as Fu Manchu. How it plays into the movie, I have no idea. Zombie reportedly filmed about 30 minutes of footage before editing it down to the 2-minute trailer.
And then there’s Thanksgiving, written and directed by Eli Roth, a homage parody of the holiday slasher craze of the early 1980s. It’s about a killer dressed as a pilgrim killing people around Plymouth, Mass. Biehn appears in a small scene as the town sheriff and Roth, who also appeared as a bar patron in Death Proof, is one of the victims. In 2023, Roth was finally able to make a full movie. However, they decided since so much time had passed between the fake trailer and the real movie, it would be a “reboot.” The trailer was actually real but the movie became so obscure it’s mostly lost.
In Canada theaters, the fake trailer Hobo With a Shotgun was released. It was part of a contest for aspiring filmmakers and Jason Eisener won. But it looks cheap and horrible. It was made into a real movie in 2011 with Rutger Hauer in the title role. It’s a mess of a movie and I don’t recommend it.
I do recommend Grindhouse as one of those movies for people who spent their youth watching bad movies, like myself. It’s hard to imagine to people today but a lot of times, cable stations would run daily blocks of bad movies on the weekends and especially at night. USA network would show shlock movies late at night on the weekends. The home video market and cable TV pretty much did away with the need for real grindhouse theaters. Why go to a theater when you can watch it at home?
A movie experience like this was never bound to turn a profit. It’s failure at the box office almost seems to be resonate with the real movies. During the opening credits of Death Proof, there’s a split second of a title that indicates the movie was called Thunder Bolt before switches to another generic title card with words Death Proof. Most of these movies were often produced cheap and bounced around from distributor to distributor with different titles. Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left was at one time released as Night of Vengeance. Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive was also released under titles Death Trap, Horror Hotel and Starlight Slaughter. Even the infamous I Spit On Your Grave was originally titled as Day of the Woman.
Some times, movies would bomb so the distributors and theaters would switch the titles to try to make it more interesting to moviegoers. Without home video, a lot of movies spent months if not years being shown in movie theaters. I guess Tarantino and Rodriguez had too much faith in their audience. Even still, the movie’s failure is a wonderful trolling of the Weinsteins.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 