Full House

Early this afternoon, I saw Grindhouse, and I've been wondering how I should review it all day.

This "double feature" is intended as an homage to cheesy cinema of the 70s, and thus a certain style and quality was being aimed for. So first, you have to ask yourself, if someone deliberately sets out to make a bad movie, and successfully achieves that, does that make it a good movie? To judge by the generally enthusiastic praises being heaped on this movie by critics, it would seem the answer is yes.

Me, I'm not so sure. I've seen movies as stupidly plotted, woodenly dialogued, and mindlessly visceral as the two films that make up Grindhouse, and in those past cases, I've pretty much panned the movie unless it really kept me on the edge of my seat. Why then should this movie deserve cheers for its deficiencies? To me, this is sort of a "were Marcelle Duchamp and/or Jackson Pollack really artists?" sort of debate. But I myself have reviewed many movies in the past from a standpoint of "it's pretty good for what it is" -- a good fluffy horror movie, a good mindless action flick, and so forth. So, for the sake of argument, let's say that yes, one can call Grindhouse a good movie if it captures its intended mood.

On that score, the first movie, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, is pretty damn good. With a plot held together by duct tape and bailing wire (little more than a framework for delivering trailer-worthy one liners), it delivers one crazy, over-the-top thrill after another. It zips along at a quick pace, and the actors really suck you into the experience despite the fact they're all playing caricatures more than characters. On its own, I'd probably give it a B+.

Then there are the fake movie trailers, one at the beginning of Grindhouse, and three between the two films. Three of these are outstanding -- the highlight of the entire experience. Machete sets the tone for Grindhouse right from the top, and is a fun tip of the hat for fans of Rodriguez's other films. Don't, from the makers of Shaun of the Dead, delivers the biggest laughs. And Thanksgiving is absolutely perfect in that it's beyond outrageous, but when you stop to think about it, only takes things a small notch farther than most slasher films today do anyway. As for the other trailer, Werewolf Women of the SS? Total flop. Makes me nervous about Rob Zombie's upcoming Halloween remake.

But it was not as big a flop as Quentin Tarantino's piece of Grindhouse, the second movie, Death Proof. It's like he didn't get the memo of what the whole experience was supposed to be about: relentless, over-the-top, visceral thrills. Instead, he seems to have come up with a single idea: a car chase which has someone riding on the hood of one of the cars the entire time, like a T.J. Hooker marathon. But that only amounts to about 15 minutes of film, and he had 90 to fill. Yet rather than fill it up with the kind of escapist fun like in Planet Terror, he put in 75 minutes of his usual dialogue-centric prattle.

Now, you either love this stuff, or you hate this stuff. Me, I think it's pretty lame that every character in a Quentin Tarantino movie has speech patterns just like Quentin Tarantino himself. But even if you do love that stuff, I think you have to admit that this sort of verbal tennis is not at all in keeping with the style of Planet Terror or any of the Grindhouse trailers.

In short, I think Tarantino made a really bad movie, and because it doesn't fit the tone of the other intentionally bad pieces I've "agreed" to evaluate on that basis, it can't even get the benefit of the doubt. There are a few exciting moments in the car chase that caps the movie, but it takes an eternity to get there. Death Proof is a D-. There are any number of better "road rage" movies out there, from the surprisingly good Joyride to the TV movie that was one of Steven Spielberg's first efforts, Duel.

B+ and D- would average out to C, but I'm going to tip the scale upward a bit in favor of the truly great previews, and give Grindhouse a C+ overall. But in my opinion, if you walk about after the Thanksgiving trailer, and before Death Proof starts, you'll have an A- experience.