Grindhouse

I was very interested to see this movie. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill) and Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn, El Mariachi Trilogy and Sin City) and it made it to the IMDb Top 250 in its release week although it performed poorly in the box office.

The idea is simple, you have 2 full length feature movies with trailers for fake movies in-between. I am a fan of Tarantino and Rodriguez, so you must think how excited I was to watch this movie.

The movie was not released in cinemas where I live, so I got my copies from you-know-where!!! I only got to see one of the fake trailers, out of four. I will look for the rest and try to see them, but this review is for the 2 feature movies; Planet Terror by Rodriguez and Death Proof by Tarantino.


Planet Terror

This movie is a spoof of all the cheap zombie/sci-fi B-movies. You get crazy soldiers with a crazy scientist, redneck Texans, vigilante police officers with shotguns, some hot chicks and a hero who is a nobody and everyone calls him Wray, but when things go wrong, it turn out that he is El Wray, the badass.

Wray's girlfriend gets attacked by zombies and her leg is chopped off, instead she has an assault rifle with an attached grenade launcher!

This movie resembles From Dusk Till Dawn a lot. If you liked the former, you will certainly like Planet Terror. The movie has a visual filter than makes the screen grainy and very old, like you are watching a movie in a very cheap theater, which is intended by the makers. The soundtrack of this movie is also pretty good. The main rock theme blends with the action smoothly, and it has the cheesy feeling that accompanies the whole movie.

All in all, the movie was good. It was so cheesy to the extent that it was good!

If you like zombies or other sci-fi related movies, or if you want to see a ridiculously cheesy action movie, you will like Planet Terror.

6.5/10



Death Proof

This is Tarantino's newest movie. This guy has a problem. He is very self-conscious. If you have seen Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, then you saw Jackie Brown, you will know what I mean. His hits will make him so full of air that his next movie will be not-so-good. In our case, Kill Bill is the good movie and Death Proof is the bad one.

This movie is incredibly boring, and I have seen a lot of boring movies, so I know what boring is! It's so full of ego, I thought it would burst. There is ZERO plot. There are lots of f-words and strong language for no reason other than ... well, to make the movie sound cool. Anyone who have seen Pulp Fiction will know that f-words can make the dialog a bit interesting. But this is too much.

The plot (which doesn't exist!) is about a stuntman who stalks young girls using his creepy stunt car. The movie is made of 2 parts with ZERO relevance to each other, other than the stuntman and the car. The dialogs are very, very long and again, incredibly boring... like Ocean's Twelve-boring. It's like a group of random girls talking about random things which have no relevance to each other or to the audience. The girls are also, very sleazy and almost all of them sound like Uma Thurman (The Bride) from Kill Bill. By that I mean, strong, over-confident and foul-mouthed women.

The car chase scenes are well done, but boring. This movie pays homage to all the 70s car chase movies, and this is referenced more than once in the movie. Car chases are good, but you can't base a movie on them!

The only good part of this movie was the soundtrack, which is, typical of Tarantino, very cool. The visual filters present in Planet Terror are almost missing in this movie, which is really a shame, considering that they added a lot to the feeling that I am watching a B-movie.

This is one Tarantino movie that I really didn't like... And I even liked Jackie Brown, which was great compared to this crap!

6/10... Sorry Q!

Overall rating for Grindhouse (subjective, not an average): 6/10. Only watch if you are a fan of either of the 2 directors. But if you are a regular guy who wants a good movie, avoid this.

EDIT: I changed the score of Death Proof. Now it's 6 instead of 4. It's still a bad movie, but what made me pump up the score was the fact that this movie was highly memorable! Whenever I am driving, I can't help but remembering it. But, thank God, I don't drive like Stuntman Mike!!!

The score for Grindhouse as a whole is not changed. It's still 6/10.