By MIKE JENNINGS Special to the Daily Press
Cinematic visionaries Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez take us back to the heyday of exploitative movies in their homage to the drive-in, “Grindhouse.”
Named after the seemingly endless amount of spraying and splattering of blood, the tag-team features attack your senses and pay off early with “Planet Terror.” In what is possibly Rodriguez’s finest work, he pits a gaggle of misfits against a horde of oozing, hungry zombies created by a bio-chemist who has an affinity for collecting testicles and keeping them in a jar. Truly a breathtaking ode to the classic ‘70s horror genre, Rodriguez even cameos a score of veteran B-movie actors to add to the period effect.
Center stage is the ever lovely Rose McGowan as Cherry. In “Planet Terror,” she’s a go-go dancing wanna-be comedian and sexual savior to us all. When the proverbial crap hits the fan, McGowan dawns a 50-caliber machine gun as a leg prosthesis to vengefully slaughter the puss-faced, flesh-ravaging townspeople.
The second feature of the twin-bill, “Death Proof,” is everything that we have come to love about Tarantino movies and more. Plagued with subplots and ceaseless intellectual banter, this full throttle tribute to muscle car movies gives shout-outs to the best of the best. Taking the driver seat, Kurt Russell plays a serial killer named Stuntman Mike. Expressing his desire for sensual women early, we find Mike stalking the four most beautiful women in town and eventually massacring them with his car. His rampage is cut short when he crosses paths with the likes of his own, a group of girls that just happen to have two stunt car drivers and muscle car enthusiasts.
The action pursues. We find ourselves gripping the edge of the seat as a highway encounter between the second group headed by Tracie Thomas, Rosario Dawson and New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who was Uma Thurman’s double in the “Kill Bill” movies and plays herself here. Bell winds up on the hood of a car in a death-defying chase sequence that’s as thrilling as anything I’ve seen on the big screen. A definite must-see.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 12, 2007. Read the original PDF.