Grindhouse (2007)

 

Directors: Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof)

Screenplays: Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof)

Cast:

Planet Terror: Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling, Freddy Rodriguez as "El Wray", Josh Brolin as Dr. William Block, Marley Shelton as Dr. Dakota Block, Jeff Fahey as J.T. Hague, Michael Biehn as Sheriff Hague, Rebel Rodriguez as Tony Block, Bruce Willis as Lieutenant Muldoon, Naveen Andrews as Dr. John "Abby" Abbington, Julio Oscar Mechoso as Romy, Fergie as Tammy Visan, Nicky Katt as Joe

Death Proof: Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike McKay, Zoë Bell as herself, Rosario Dawson as Abernathy Ross, Vanessa Ferlito as Arlene/Butterfly, Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Jungle Julia Lucai, Tracie Thoms as Kim Mathis, Jordan Ladd as Shanna, Rose McGowan as Pam, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Lee Montgomery

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

About as useless as a pecker on a Pope.

Grindhouse was a fascinating one-off, and as time has passed, it feels for me like a project that was never going to be a big hit and always the cult title. Considering Quentin Tarantino prior to this created the Kill Bill project, which was split into two theatrical releases, and were tributes to genre cinema with even an animated sequence from a Japanese studio, that may seen questionable as a comment, but I see Grindhouse as more of a niche concept in principal. It was a tribute to certain types of cinemas of the past than necessarily the genre films churned in them 24/7 on the notorious 42^nd Street of New York City and other locations, something which is more specific to get the references to in the project itself. Kill Bill had the advantage of being split into two halves, and riding the wave of interest of the likes of martial arts cinema, whilst this was a three hour double bill as a concept rather than the genres chosen by him and Robert Rodriguez. It appeals in principal, but in mind that this was a large budget project too, rather than a fictional double bill made on the lower budget, the project was always going to be in danger if it did not have the right amount of advertising and the right release, which it sadly did not.

The idea of paying tribute to this idea for a large budget projection was a risk, and if anything, when I was just getting into cinema at this time, it did at least catch a wave of interest in old genre and cult films that carried into decades after. It also lead to a wave of "neo-Grindhouse" films not really evoking the old exploitation films but replicating the template Grindhouse itself became, and it neither helped back then, whilst I want to return to them all, I hated most of those films when I watched them. The lack of box office success in the United States also lead to the films being split up into two theatrical features for the British market, including their initial DVD/Blu Ray releases. Contextually, Grindhouse itself came to me in its intended form with me more appreciative of its goal, whilst unfortunately, the lack of box office success when released in the United States lead to the Weinstein Company initally splitting the films up into two theatrical features for the British market. Death Proof, Tarantino's entry, was not a film I received well at all, to the point as a young lad who got into films like Pulp Fiction (1994) I thought he had lost his mojo entirely with this extended theatrical release when I caught up to this on DVD. What it was, remembering how divisive the responses from others at the time was as well, is clearly a transitional stage for his films.

But Grindhouse itself, when finally released as intended eventually, began with Robert Rodriguez’s than-fake trailer for Machete, imagining character actor Danny Trejo as a Mexican immigrant with governmental combat skills being double crossed, and thus going on a revenge mission. Fake trailers were one of the touches that were part of the Grindhouse project, though this one was kept for Planet Terror’s individual releases as here, the others lost in a project that was meant to recreate the experience of these cinemas, including some real ephemeral material shown at cinemas like the ones about age restrictions. They were touches more for a cult film crowd, but were cool to include, and whilst some of it has not aged well, entirely the stuff nodding to The Weinstein Company and the rightly disgraced Harvey Weinstein, the material is all interesting. Machete’s is interesting as it did become a film in 2010 through Rodriguez himself, with a sequel later that got more ridiculous, turning into an exploitation spin on US immigration politics. It also connects to how Planet Terror itself, as that later film, are both jokey over-the-top pastiches at their heart, full of stunt casting as Machete itself would have Lindsay Lohan as one of the roles in the trailer’s biggest gag, Trejo seducing a US senator’s wife and daughter at the same time, and inexplicably Steven Segal.

Planet Terror itself, which is about a bio chemical weapon causing a zombie outbreak, takes this further as we can have six degrees of separation games the TV series Lost, the Die Hard franchise, The Lawnmower Man (1992), and a member of the Black Eyed Peas. Planet Terror was a safer film of the two parts of this production, a pastiche with a budget to get away with violence which would have given eighties moralists a collective heart attack, with a name cast and a complete lack of seriousness meant for a crowd viewing. Planet Terror, as we set up the outbreak and the key leads, such as the mysterious traveller El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) to ex-go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), immediately shows the most contentious legacy of the Grindhouse project, that being the artificially created grain and celluloid print damage, more for all the other films which took influence to copy this aesthetic than necessarily being controversial for Grindhouse itself. If you watched any neo-Grindhouse film of the time, and this could even be found in micro-budget productions, between the late 2000s to the early 2010s, you would have seen digitally added film grain and damage, replicated from what Grindhouse did on a considerably larger budget. This is a tribute to how exploitation films in the original cinemas could be old, battered prints and as both halves play, the creators of these new films imagined the worse case scenarios where film reels went missing or salacious moments, as Planet Terror plays with, were cut out by the projectionists for keepsakes. With hindsight, this was preparing us for the tactile nature of any Blu Ray release of a title where the negative was lost and a film was preserved from a screening print, but this also makes one aware Grindhouse was always the imagined version of the thing the creators were paying tribute to. This was an imagined Grindhouse where you could have not really captured the real places, more so as Rodriquez’s is less the ideal of these types of films, from the seventies, but more the eighties films as they were coming to VHS and video rental stores.

Time is convoluted in both films, tributes to the past but made and set at the time they were produced in, and with Planet Terror, as an entire military platoon infected with the bio weapon end up in a deal gone wrong that unleashes the gas onto the local community, the tone also feels closer to a Return of the Living Dead (1985), and that era of cinema. What you get in a post-ironic form is something between the late seventies and a John Carpenter love-in, with the score paying tribute to his music, to the mid-eighties straight to video practical effects driven work. What between the gooey practical effects by Tom Savini, who gets an onscreen role too, and tributes between Lucio Fulci eye trauma, and possibly even Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) by Antonio Margheriti as an action horror film, and this feels slightly different to the goal Tarantino was after with his a seventies throwback. It is amazing to see a large budget tribute to all these, and also managing to get away with a child shooting themselves by accident, as a real taboo, but alongside Rodriguez’s trademark to make his films as independently as possible by his own hands, Planet Terror itself is purposely cool and deliberately absurd in construct.

Even when he has some really nasty gore, and sexual threat at one point, Quentin Tarantino in a cameo having a knack, between this and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), for playing creepy sexual deviants, Rodriguez plays this with pathos and parody at the same time. You feel real emotional connection to Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey as brothers in the end, but it surrounds Biehn trying to force Fahey to give up his secret barbecue recipe even in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Even in mind that Freddy Rodriguez feels one of the weaker figures, because he had to play the mysterious and sombre tough lead, his character finds himself the straight man among everyone else and eventually having to ride a pocket motorbike in a scene deliberately done for humour. There are also the obvious stunt casting moments, like having Bruce Willis as the lead of the military platoon, and the little details of Rodriguez’s own interests, making the kind of film he would want as a viewer in the truest sense. Planet Terror can also claim to have its own obsession with male genital trauma, be it Naveen Andrews, the Lost series alumni as a shady scientist, being obsessed with collecting castrated testicles, to how Tarantino, as long as he gets to name check Ava Gardner and monologue, has his penis melt off before the film ends.

Planet Terror in context made sense to begin Grindhouse, the party starter even if, with hindsight, Death Proof as the film which got the most negative reactions initially became the more interesting to unpack. Planet Terror itself is fun and ridiculous, even if now with a melancholia of how, really, this is Rose McGowan’s film. This is the moment where we sadly do have to talk about Harvey Weinstein, as alongside the fact she drifted away from films very prominently advertised in the 2010s, she is one of the women named as one of his victims, accusing him for horrible crimes, when the MeToo movement came to exist in the 2010s, that finally led to him ending in jail. Rodriguez, who dated McGowan, has talked that he learnt of the trauma she went through, and deliberately cast her in Planet Terror as a rebuttal to her being effectively blacklisted by Weinstein for crimes he committed to her. Rodriquez argued the box office failure of Grindhouse was Harvey Weinstein burying the project for this by under promoting the film¹. Whatever the circumstances for why the film was not a box office success, she is also the best thing in Planet Terror too, given Cherry Darling a playful spark between wanting to be a comedian and talking of all her useless little talents through the film. This is even before we get to her character spending most of the film without a leg, the special effects still great to this day, and leading to the image that sold this film even if it only happens near the end of Planet Terror, attaching a rifle with a rocket launcher attachment as an improvised false leg. It is the kind of role, one of two through both films, which should have been a platform for even bigger films but sadly was not to be.

The original way to see the two films that make up Grinndhouse meant we never got the trailers originally meant to split them up. Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, feeling like a pitch reel to an actual project, does encapsulate how exploitation films are historically contextualised and more complicated than Grindhouse itself, in this case the moral quandary that led to the Naziploitation genre. Most of those films got on the Video Nasties list in the United Kingdom and most are still not allowed to be released due to their perceived mix of sex, violence and Nazis by the British Board of Film Classification, the one exception being the one with the really infamous VHS cover, SS Experiment Love Camp (1976), which is just bad taste and inexplicably links to the theme of genital trauma as a male character has his surgically removed, to be given to a high ranking Nazi officer, and is naturally not pleased. How they came to be is not something I can adequately write, in mind they come twenty to thirty years after the fallout of World War II and were as much for illicit sexploitation scenarios as part of the lasting effect of that war, but Zombie’s take is broad and over-the-top. It is not portraying the completely exploitative aspect to an Italian film like SS Experiment Love Camp nor the serious takes on the subject, like The Night Porter (1974), also coming out at the time. Some may know this trailer for Nicolas Cage as the Fiendish Doctor Fu Manchu, another contentious exploitation concept we English, and Sax Rohmer, have to be blamed for, but alongside the fact they do not have him in yellow face as Christopher Lee did playing the character a few times in the sixties, the absurdity is there in the premise of Nazis having a secret werewolf woman project and yet also bringing in this character as a possible sub-contractor to the project. Could it have worked? It would have been highly stylised and divisive as Rob Zombie’s other work, especially as this was the time he helmed two Halloween reboots, though the trailer promised if they were able to make a film with Udo Kier, Sybil Danning and Bill Moseley as a mad Germanic doctor, let alone Nicolas Cage, I would have been interested.

Don’t by Edgar Wright was a really good parody of seventies horror. A tribute to the nastier side of British horror, the world of directors like Pete Walker, the nod to Video Nasties was appropriate in the last paragraph as, at one time, having “Don’t” in the title was seen as a good marketing tool at one point and lead to a lot of films on that Video Nasties list which fit this, such as Don’t Go Into the Woods (1981) to Don’t Go in the House (1979). Wright’s feels like it was meant to be a trailer and nothing else, perfect as it is as a cavalcade of seedy British horror from the seventies distilled into a short work, including the fact they had recognisable faces from our TV to films, making cameos from Nick Frost as a man baby in a diaper in a grungy basement appropriate as a stunt cameo on two levels. Thanksgiving from Eli Roth also pulled out a memorable trailer, though his in 2023 finally became a full feature by himself. How a thanksgiving slasher film never already existed is strange, but he clearly saw Don’t in the editing stages and felt he had to top it, having images as a tribute to murky independent slashers that will scar a few viewers. He gets the aesthetic of slashers, and for a director I do vary on, certainly, for the man who never held back for Hostel (2005) to The Green Inferno (2013), he made sure to make a work that was memorable. He took the type of film that came in the wake of Friday the 13^th being successful, and lead to independent producers all jumping on the band wagon, and made the trailer to the imaginary one Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel warned viewers about. The ill advised decision of one girl to do strip trampolining to the human turkey is enough to claw into the human memory against a viewer’s will, but I can now thank Roth, with a human head on chicken for added grossness, for the snapshot of inappropriate use of poultry that will last.

These three trailers are a prelude, and honestly a palette cleaner, for Death Proof as whilst it is set around Quentin Tarantino wanting to stage a car chase in the tradition of classic seventies car chase films like Vanishing Point (1971), to which he and those involved pulled it off completely, his film is a literal gear change on purpose throughout itself. Death Proof for all its potential flaws, subjective to the viewer, is the far more complex film to dissect as the set-up, a tribute to car films without using CGI, however led to a deliberate shift onwards in how his films would be structured. It is close to a slasher premise too in how it follows a homicidal stunt driver named Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who targets women with a “death proof” car, one reinforced as old car stunt vehicles were to allow him to survive horrible crashes, barring some injuries, but still drive head first into victims’ cars and kill them. Where this film did not originally work for me, and I found it a disappointment, is that this is a dialogue heavy work with a simple two act structure, very simple, but lets the dialogue linger far longer than it originally did in older films of his before.

I hated the extended cut, as many, because I came to Tarantino through work which was crime pastiches with sassy dialogue on a surface level, still found here in a different genre but with a clear change in tone. A spoiler has to be nodded to for two films at once, but this is the structure of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) entirely, following one group of women before the second act introduces another set. Tarantino focuses on characters, in a slasher template, you would only linger on for ten minutes for an entitled longer length, forcing one to live with them far longer than other films. It is not perfect: some of the dialogue caused me to cringe and think of how pissed off Spike Lee was with him for certain choices of words for black characters, though the debate about whether Tarantino can write female leads is subjective, as I am not going to dismiss the idea of women who are gear heads and watch Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) as they exist. I do also have an uncomfortable question of whether sexism ever came into the issue about this film getting a negative reaction from what I perceived of it having back in the day. Even from a male director-writer, it is almost entirely about women talking in the downtime between spectacle scenes, and yet was one of his most divisive films. Certainly there is a sense here we were moving away from monologues about what Big Macs were named in France, ebbing away in favour for the dialogue fully taking over as the prime mover of his stories. Tarantino was already reaching this with Jackie Brown (1997), entering more complex emotions, and I vividly remember Kill Bill Part 2 (2004) already being divisive, as it went against the high octane shock that was the first part, with its memorable sword battle finale, with far more tonal shifts, and even went out of its way to undercut the final revenge against “Bill” himself by having it being a languid character drama for the final act. What is changing from this point and Death Proof feels like the final gasp of the earlier part of his career, the moment he was no longer the “cool” cult director who was mainstream, but the esoteric director-writer who still spoke in cult films, and had the budgets to allow him to make the films he did on after Grindhouse, who instead wanted to play with structure and pace in dialogue driven movies onwards.

The importance of the women in the cast cannot be understated - Vanessa Ferlito, Rose McGowan again in another role, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead – all giving great performances with dialogue which, whether you think of it, is a lot more dynamic than sadly could still be passed to actresses into films made after this, and by the second half, we switch to Stuntman Mike having the tables turned and the emphasis on a strong female cast in its centre integral to the production. From the cool character that showed Kurt Russell was always good, to being out of his depth and showing he is still good playing a snivelling weasel, he encounters a group including stunt women for that final act, such as New Zealand stunt actress Zoe Bell playing Zoe Bell, Tarantino in probably the sweetest moment of his entire career paying tribute to someone who worked on the Kill Bill project, and would continue to work with him throughout the others film onscreen as an actress. He lets her play herself whilst also getting to pull off an insane stunt involving playing "ship's mass", hanging off a car at fast speed for real on camera, and no less on the same car from one of the films ritualised lavished upon in the dialogue. The second half legitimately emphases this was always a film about strong women and symbolically castrating male ego, making that disconcerting thought sexism played into the reaction to the film’s lengthy dialogue more concerning if purely speculative. It is telling how even a seemingly pointless cameo by Eli Roth actually makes sense, as he makes a good sleaze ball in a more conventional sort, in a dialogue scene in the Grindhouse version where he plans with a friend to get women drunk enough they allow men to join them at a beach house for the weekend, still a scummy toxic male attitude. More examples of this are found in the extended cut, with one extended scene involving an "Italian Vogue" magazine being offered at a gas station, and it is contrasted by a legitimate psychopath in Stuntman Mike, whose modus operandi briefly evokes J.D. Ballad’s controversial novel Crash (1973), and David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 adaptation, when someone suggests mowing women down in his car, an item symbolically connected to masculinity in a variety of pop culture, as a sexual thrill. The ending even plays to a symbolic act of pegging but with a female driver ramming the male driver's car from behind over and over.

The extended cut complicated this as it alters the pace. It has new scenes, and removes the "Missing Footage" section, tricking the viewer into not being able to see the clothed lap dance set up with Vanessa Ferlito in the first act. It also allows one to appreciate the music as, even when I hated the film, I still got hold of the soundtrack album as, between T. Rex's Jeepster to April March's interpretation of Chick Habit, a Serge Gainsbourg number she added new English lyrics to, Quentin Tarantino always was always good at choosing existing songs for his films. Though the extended cut itself adds scenes that now feel good and of worth in having, in Grindhouse, the pacing works entirely, and it feels as if, after Kill Bill and the car chase that succeeds triumphantly here, Tarantino was waving goodbye to his older films entirely. Action still transpires in films like Django Unchained (2012), but when The Hateful Eight (2015) was set up as a misanthropic chamber piece I saw at the cinema, set in the confines of a western and set in a cabin, I see something changed when we got to Inglourious Basterds (2009) with his attitude to his stories.

Grindhouse altogether is a compelling work, one which was a mad project to get off the ground at all, as unless they stayed with lower budgets, Tarantino and Rodriguez’s dream ballooned out into what it became always placed a harder target for it to reach due to a niche concept. That niche, the re-admiration of cult and genre cinema, did thankfully pay off as, whilst not a success and with half of it divisive originally, it followed a wave of things that happened for the better. The likes of “Ozploitation” became a concept for example, as one documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! a year later helped Australian heritage to be celebrated, with this film in Tarantino's end credits thanking a big name in that documentary, filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith, in a detail predating this example. Eventually you will get Blu Ray (and 4K) restorations of even maligned filmmakers like Al Adamson in big special edition, and that is ultimately the real success of the Grindhouse project, which was a big and intriguing tribute to these projects which got fans even if the box office was not a success. That did become an industry, and grew into something great, making this a film I would still salute for helping with this trajectory. Also undeniably, in terms of my fascination especially with films which break the three hour plus lengths, as they can be very unconventional films in their own right even as stereotypical "serious dramas", there is something about a three plus hour tribute to an actual genre film double bill that is compelling, especially as so much is to be talked about and appreciated in all its moving parts. In turn, it makes one wish I had greater access to the modern day double bill retrospectives in cinemas which do not have the potential urine smell in the theatre.

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1) Robert Rodriguez Says Casting Rose McGowan in ‘Grindhouse’ Was an F-U to Harvey Weinstein, written by Brent Lang and published by Variety on October 27th 2017.