PLANET TERROR
(Review)

Robert Rodriguez confuses me.
El Mariachi blew me away with its crackling, low budget ingenuity and I had high hopes for whatever Rodriguez would cook up next. What came after however, tended to disappoint, more than anything else.
Desperado just seemed to be El Mariachi on a Hollywood budget, Four Rooms (the anthology he contributed to alongside Quentin Tarantino, Alexandre Rockwell, and Allison Anders) seemed more self-indulgent than actually funny, The Faculty lacked the visual frenzy of Rodriguez’s audacious debut, Once Upon A Time in Mexico didn’t really come alive for me, and Sin City was little more than an interesting ultra-violent visual experience.
Then there are his kiddie movies (the Spy Kids flicks and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl) which were clearly not made with me in mind.
Perhaps the only post-El Mariachi film Rodriguez helmed which I actually enjoyed was his team-up with Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn, a vampire movie which reveled in its B-movie roots.
The only one, that is, till I got to visit Planet Terror.

Originally one half of Grindhouse, Planet Terror is Rodriguez’s crazy-a$$ contribution to the raging subgenre of zombie cinema.
Here, a chemical is unleashed on an unsuspecting Texan populace, which mutates its victims into pustule-ridden monstrosities hungry for flesh. As per the template of your average zombie mash, Planet Terror follows a number of characters who eventually converge to become one ragtag group of survivors that must navigate the chaos of a world that’s suddenly gone Romero.
Among the motley crew are go-go dancer/aspiring stand-up comic Cherry Darling (Scream’s Rose McGowan), anesthesiologist Dakota Block (Marley Shelton, from Pleasantville and Sin City), and the mysterious El Wray (Six Feet Under’s Freddy Rodriguez). Along for the ride are biochemist/testicle fetishist Abby (Lost’s Naveen Andrews), would-be barbecue king J.T. (Jeff Fahey, set to appear in Season 4 of Lost), J.T.’s brother Sheriff Hague (former James Cameron collaborator Michael Biehn), and Deputy Tolo (make-up effects maestro Tom Savini). Oh, and a certain Earl McGraw (Michael Parks), who some of you may have seen in Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga as well as Death Proof. (Earl happens to be Dakota’s pop, and Dakota is also actually seen briefly in Death Proof.)

Populating this wild ride with these misfits, Rodriguez delivers a solid exercise in fun, B-movie schlock; this is the sort of tongue-in-cheek insanity that some low budget horror films can only hope to attain. Utilizing a good mix of old school practical make-up effects, digital effects, and painfully obvious dummies, Rodriguez showers the audience with over-the-top gore as the infected transform into oozing grotesqueries ready to chow down on the nearest live human being, while spurting copious amounts of the red stuff as they’re being gunned down, or run over, or chopper rotored, by El Wray and company.

Planet Terror is a runny, rowdy, four-cheese pizza without the dough. It’s messy and messed-up and one of the most lunatic popcorn flicks ever made for the midnight movie crowd.
At long last, Rodriguez is back in the game, and I am so looking forward to his remake of Barbarella, where he re-teams with McGowan (who has since become his real-life Cherry Darling).
Bring it on, baby!

Parting shot: Notable musical moments: Rose McGowan’s cover of “You Belong To Me,” which is played over the end title crawl, and, though it’s not my favourite cover of theirs, Nouvelle Vague’s “Too Drunk To F*ck,” which plays as QT tries to do something nasty to Cherry, only to have something really nasty happen to him…

Parting shot 2: Reportedly, Rodriguez is also set to turn his faux trailer from Grindhouse, Machete—which plays right before Planet Terror starts—into a full-fledged straight-to-DVD film.
More schlocky insanity! With Cheech Marin as a gun-toting priest! Brilliant!

(Planet Terror OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of ew.com; Robert Rodriguez on-set image courtesy of rollingstone.com.)

DEATH PROOF
(Review)

So April March’s “Chick Habit” is jangling around in my head, and it’s one of the things I’m taking away from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.
Originally Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse, Death Proof has apparently taken on the role of favoured son, having its script released in book form, and having driven its way to Cannes, leaving Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror abandoned by the side of the road.
Much has been made of Grindhouse’s failure at the American box office (a discussion of the whys and wherefores of which would take up an article or three), but now that the two features have been split for their international and DVD releases, what we’re looking at here is to address the question, So is Death Proof any good?
And the answer is (he says rather coyly)…

Just as Grindhouse was split neatly in two, Death Proof itself is basically two vignettes of serial killer Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), as he terrorizes sweet young things with his car.
Said young things include Sin City’s Rosario Dawson, CSI: NY’s Vanessa Ferlito, Scream’s Rose McGowan, Cabin Fever’s Jordan Ladd, and Kiwi stuntwoman Zoe Bell (as herself!).
So there are some car stunts, gruesome deaths, and a lap dance. Oh, and talking. A whole lotta talking.
Of course, we all know Tarantino loves his Chatty Patties, and Death Proof is chock-a-block, wall-to-wall, pedal to the metal yadda yadda. Which is fine, actually, but when each vignette is basically one long, protracted discussion, topped by a car chase and violence, there isn’t much to warrant the feature-length treatment.
If only Tarantino had fueled Death Proof with a little more Kill Bill (the momentum of the moving image as narrative engine) and less Jackie Brown, this might have been a far more enjoyable ride.

Having said that, Death Proof does have its moments (and I did end up liking it more than Jackie Brown).
There’s Eli Roth and Nicky Katt in small roles, there’s Three Kicks to the Head Part Three, there’s the Ship’s Mast gone wrong sequence, there’s the moment the second vignette bursts into glorious, eye-popping Technicolor, there’s Zoe Bell as herself.
And then of course, there are the Kill Bill nods. (And sure, one of them was pure expository device, but it was an entertaining expository device nonetheless.)

Ultimately, Death Proof is fun—provided you can enjoy the lo-fi, no-budget grindhouse aesthetic the production adopts—but would have been far more effective at a shorter running time.
Ironically, perhaps the best place for Death Proof may have been within the confines of a grindhouse-themed anthology (as opposed to the double bill approach Grindhouse took), where it would have been freed of the burden of a feature length running time. As it stands, this just feels like a short story that’s been padded, force-grown into a novel.
Maybe if Tarantino had filled in the time with more narrative nuts and bolts from the School of Cause-and-Effect Plot Action instead of all that blather, we could have enjoyed a top-down, wind-in-your-hair, radio-blasting-“Chick Habit” ride down the freeway rather than the erratic, fluctuating, stuttering trip we’re taken on.

Parting shot: Before Dimension does the double-dip (and I can only assume that giving Grindhouse the proper DVD treatment is somewhere in the cards), where do the faux trailers get their chance to grace TV screens?

(Death Proof OS courtesy of aintitcool.com; UK quad courtesy of empireonline.com; script book cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)