But Tarantino does cheat.Souped-up hot rods, buckets of gore, sexpots, car chases, zombies with exploding pustules - I mean, seriously, what's not to love? Who could resist a movie where the leading lady loses a leg in an attack of the living dead, and her boyfriend replaces it with the perfect B-movie accessory: a snap-on, lock-'n'-load prosthetic machine-gun. Everyone gets into the spirit of the grindhouse. The crews on all the films - including the trailers made by directors Edgar Wright (“Shawn of the Dead”), Eli Roth (“Hostel”) and Rob Zombie (“The Devil’s Rejects”) - do terrific jobs at being awful, or maybe just being awfully good. The reference point of “Proof,” of course, are such movies as “Vanishing Point,” “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry” and even Steven Spielberg’s TV film “Duel.” “Proof” might lack the existentialism that some of those films wore with pride, but this mock film is a far cry from a cheap splatter film or sexploitationer. The acting is purposeful and the car stunts are terrific. The women’s characters in both groups have strong, vivid identities. “Proof” is an exploitation, but then again it isn’t. So, deliciously, it’s ladies’ revenge time. Only this time, two are movie stuntwomen (Zoe Bell, an actual stuntwoman, and Tracie Thoms), and one packs a gun. Tarantino shows the wreck four times so you can witness the destruction of the four women’s bodies in slow motion.Īwhile later, Stuntman Mike is back on the prowl, stalking another group of women. Finally, he contrives a head-on collision between the women’s car and his own “death proof” stunt car on a dark road that kills all the women. They are stalked by a jigsaw-faced man who calls himself Stuntman Mike, played with grizzled smarminess by John Carpenter veteran Kurt Russell. You watch a group of sexy young women drink and party through several bars on a hot Austin night. The only problem with “Proof” is an unnecessarily protracted setup. You wouldn’t mind a few more missing reels. The film develops a bad habit of repeating lines, jokes and zombie bits many times. There isn’t much more to the film, other than to enjoy cameos by Bruce Willis and Tarantino and smirk at the acting on steroids. Thus, all the ex-dancer has to do is kick and point and she can eradicate dozens of zombies. Her boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez) helpfully substitutes first a wooden stick, then later, most ingeniously, a machine gun. The only remarkable character is the movie’s heroine, Rose McGowan’s Cherry, a go-go dancer whose leg gets torn off. Those resistant to the strain must fight off the ghouls. As the virus spreads, nearly everyone turns into a bubble-skinned, flesh-eating fiend. A biological chemical escapes into the atmosphere in a small Texas town. In “Terror,” the characters are all Id and action, and plot barely exists. If the two are to separate, as they might in non-English-speaking markets, Rodriguez’s movie could lose out, especially given the plethora of zombie movies in recent years. Paired together, the double bill will hit box office gold. But how about, in the case of the overly repetitive, one-note “Terror,” boring? Of course, no one can complain it’s bad because that’s the point. “Grindhouse” is, necessarily, an uneven and compromised movie adventure. But in what low-budget exploitationer would you find a single take lasting untold minutes as the camera pirouettes around four characters in deep discussion at a diner? Or, for that matter, multimillion-dollar smash-and-accelerate car chases that go on forever? The print doesn’t even look that scratched. Oh sure, the characters in his psycho-car chase movie, “Death Proof,” don’t have the depth one finds in an Ingmar Bergman film, and it follows all the genre conventions. Bodies crumble with remarkable ease and gushing blood looks like raspberry jelly.īut Tarantino cheats. Rodriguez fulfills his end of the bargain by turning in a deliberately bad zombie horror movie, “Planet Terror,” with overzealous acting, paper-thin characters, scratches and splotches everywhere and absurdly fake gore. The only things missing are sticky floors and a guy snoring in the seventh row. The thing runs 11 minutes past the three-hour mark and nicely straddles the line between tongue-in-cheek spoof and genuine homage to the outrageous vitality and extreme situations moviemakers once crammed into cheap genre films that demanded sex, action and gore. The package includes four goofball “Coming Attractions” for nonexistent B-movies, scratchy prints, missing scenes plus an ad for a local take-your-chances diner. This scoring involves “Grindhouse,” two new action-packed films masquerading as a double bill of ‘60s- and ‘70s-era exploitation flicks.Įach of the two writer-directors made a movie in the grand tradition of Samuel Z. LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - If you were keeping score, it would be Quentin Tarantino 1, Robert Rodriguez 0.
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