Double trouble

Born to be wild: Cherry (Rose McGowan, left) and Dakota (Marley Shelton) battle an army of zombie-like humanoids in Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse. (Alliance Atlantis)

Grindhouse is a double-feature tribute to the gleefully tawdry exploitation flicks that ran back to back in the grimy “grindhouse” theatres of yesteryear (well, the '70s). The very word conjures cracked, bacteria-crusted vinyl seats and cigarette smoke wafting in a column of projector light. But the new Grindhouse is home to two hugely successful directors, Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), neither of whom needs to work for scale anymore. The resulting joke is that a lot of money went into making these films, with their scratched frames and missing reels, look cheap. But one suspects Rodriguez and Tarantino would pay just about anything to finally achieve total regression to a little-boy state. Grindhouse feels like a three-hours-plus therapy session for the guys, delivering them to a time when movies were simpler and so were they. Both auteurs probably feel much better now.

And the rest of us? How do we feel? A little headachy from the tire squeals, perhaps? A little nauseous from the exploding chunks of human meat? Both movies work better when one accepts that all reaction will be physical rather than intellectual: don’t think, puke. There’s no irony to consider here – the Scream franchise had more social commentary in it – because there’s no distance from the material; we’re right inside the old-school flesh of the cheapie genre world, like it or not. The directors, who appear to have had a blast, definitely do.

The first of the two films is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie/biological warfare merger that starts with a pole dance, naturally. Attached to that pole is Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), a disconsolate go-go dancer who gets her leg ripped off by rampaging mutants with puss-streaked faces like blister packs of … blisters.

To battle the zombie forces overtaking Anytown, U.S.A., Cherry and her ex, a gold-hearted outlaw named Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), join up with a handful of survivors: the grizzled jokester (Jeff Fahey); the idiot sheriff played by a generic TV actor (Michael Biehn); the sexy doctor wielding syringes (Marley Shelton). But the production values required to realize the comic-book fantasy of a hot chick slaying zombies with a prosthetic machine-gun leg are a bit more advanced than anything John Carpenter could have afforded pre-Halloween. Rodriguez’s film is swaggering homage; imitation with just enough invention to show that he’s no hack himself – he’s a connoisseur of hacks.

Likewise, the “intermission” is a series of arch faux-trailers by modern-day genre directors eager to slum. Eli Roth (Cabin Fever) sullies a sacrosanct American holiday with Thanksgiving, where the serving of a splayed, butter-baked animal is truly unholy. Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects) imagines the self-explanatory Werewolf Women of the S.S. and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) gets the most laughs inside a Gothic haunted house with gasping actors in bad wigs and British teeth. The trailers, amusing little nuggets of shriek nostalgia, induce just the right amount of pop culture catharsis on their own, so much so that one begins to wonder whether Rodriguez and Tarantino might have benefited from a two-minute time limit themselves.

Reinvigorated Russell: Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, right) introduces Pam (Rose McGowan) to his car in Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse. (Alliance Atlantis)

Death Proof, Tarantino’s slasher-car-chase ditty, is a vehicle – with skull and crossbones on the hood – for another faded star. But Kurt Russell, unlike Tarantino’s other exhumations, including John Travolta and Pam Grier, has never really gone away; he’s just padded over to family movies in his twilight years. Tarantino pooh-poohs Russell’s cuddly Miracle present, preferring his greasy criminal past in Escape from New York.

Something about Tarantino – I suspect it’s infectious enthusiasm – does pull great performances out of actors who stopped trying a long time ago, and Russell operates on a different register than he usually does: he’s more attentive to the world around him somehow, and playful. So much so, however, that he’s almost too likable. Under a long white face scar, Russell plays Stuntman Mike, a jocular sociopath in a black muscle car who hits on a woman in a bar with this blunt object (and funny) pickup line: “You saw my car, I saw your legs.”

The legs belong to one of four women Stuntman Mike has been stalking, an army of gorgeous tough-talkers in short-shorts and retro T-shirts; one even sports mini-braids like the ultimate '70s pretty-girl bit player, P.J. Soles. Both films shrug off the strange conflict between their reverence for old movies and the new technology that’s part of every contemporary screenplay; we’re in some '70s-present-future hybrid decade. The women text-message their boyfriends, but listen to old soul music off a jukebox; cellphones beep, but as Stuntman Mike tells one sacrificial blond about movies in the old days (well, the '70s), things were better “before CGI.”

The women themselves reference Tarantino’s personal entertainment fetishes, name-checking songs, and cars, and cult movies like Vanishing Point and Gone in 60 Seconds (not, it’s pointed out, the sleek 2000 Angelina Jolie remake, but the rough 1974 original). This chatter – and there’s far too much of it – is the same old hamburger royale, reheated and re-served; neither genre-bending nor suspense-building, it’s life-sucking, and the film withers away during the blabbedy-blah. Mostly, the dialogue sounds like Tarantino riffing on late-night TV or with his old buddies at the video store where he used to work. Is there any director, this side of Woody Allen, whose characters more absorb his own personality, mannerisms and raised-at-the-movies lingo, daddy-o?

The fact that all Tarantino characters, male or female, are basically the same wiseacre invention has one strange side effect: Tarantino is something of a feminist. Putting aside the gangster-fantasy testosterone high of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has made most of his leads fierce female warriors: Jackie Brown – by far his most mature, emotionally engaged work – the Kill Bills and now, Death Proof. These buff women talk like men (or at least, like Tarantino), and they smash and destroy like men (Planet Terror’s Cherry is a strong woman, too, but the fact that she spreads her legs and shoots bullets is just a little too fear-of-the-female, vagina dentata to pass as girl power).

Seeing as the grindhouse usually prefers its women sliced and silent, Tarantino looks pretty subversive; if he’s not careful, he’ll end up celebrated in a Feminist Film Theory graduate seminar about the “male gaze,” a hero for letting his warrior goddesses move from passive objects to ass-kicking subjects. Then again, he does love the two-minute jean shorts booty-bouncing close-up, so maybe he’ll be more of a complicated footnote.

Nonetheless, Death Proof turns into a revenge tale that tries to atone for the reams of squealing, helpless women who have been filleted at drive-ins for decades. Long after the bar scene, a different group of four babes – less hot, but much smarter – end up in a fantastic, chest-fluttering car chase with Stuntman Mike. A strapping blond, played by New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell (she doubled for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Vol. I and II), takes the brunt of Mike’s madman driving, and gives as good as she gets. This is the most nail-chewing, slamming, excellent segment of either film. Finally, the experiment achieves pure escapism, the kind you remember from your own private grindhouse, whether that was late-night TV, or video rentals or an actual dive theatre.

But Grindhouse only achieves that childhood rush a few times. The rest is an impressively long checklist of film nerd pleasures – the “Restricted” cartoon with the blue cat; the bad continuity – that’s a smile, but not a giggle. Grindhouse isn’t exciting enough to offer the consistent guilty pleasure of true trash, nor wise enough to be anything more. In the future, Rodriguez and Tarantino – two redoubtable, talented directors – might consider a better, cheaper venue to display their cinephelia: it’s called a blog, daddy-o. The kids love ’em.

Grindhouse opens across Canada on April 6.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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