by Kris Katz
Brief spoiler-free entertainment reviews

Friday, January 25, 2008

Grindhouse (2007)

guest review by Phineas Gopher

More than a few people complained when Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill was broken up into two volumes which were then released months apart. Those people felt they were paying for the same movie twice. In a welcome twist, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have teamed up to deliver just the opposite: two movies for the price of one. Each director offered a full-length feature shot in the style of 70s exploitation cinema, billed jointly under the name Grindhouse, with hilarious fake movie trailers linking the films. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is an over-the-top take on the zombie and military disaster genres. The poster image of actress Rose McGowan with a machine gun for a leg sums up its gritty, campy tone. Parts of it are funny, a lot of it is gross, but the whole thing is wild and action-packed. Tarantino's offering, Death Proof is more meditative, and is this reviewer's favorite of the two. It starts as a buddy movie with a bunch of bar-hopping girls drinking and talking before introducing a unique serial killer in the form of Stuntman Mike (a perfectly cast Kurt Russell). The tone and genre shift several times, arguably offering the equivalent of two small films that happen to be related (take that, Kill Bill naysayers). Tarantino's culturally relevant dialogue is in top-form, and his CGI-less approach to the stuntwork gives us car-on-car action that seems straight out of the 70s (in a good way). It's a shame the two films were broken up and released separately in most places outside the U.S., but a special edition DVD (or Blu-Ray, or something) should correct this in the future.

8 out of 10.

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