Stupid Fun
Finding it coming out on Good Friday -- oddly enough a company holiday -- Nick and I caught the first showing of The Grindhouse at a local AMC Friday morning. The $5 matinee tickets and still having hours of daylight ahead are both good reasons for hitting the early shows.
At roughly three hours and eleven minutes it was well into the afternoon when we emerged into the sunlight again.
If you're unfamiliar with The Grindhouse, it's an attempt to recreate a 1970's, B-movie, exploitation film experience. Pandering to the baser elements, it's not an experience to be analyzed aside from, perhaps, its cultural elements -- and I'm not even going to go that far. Both films are set in the present, so there's not an attempt to create these as "lost" movies.
If you've seen Kill Bill then you'll be set up for the female empowerment angle that ultimately comes through in both of the movies in this double feature -- the contagion horror of Planet Terror and the vehicular stunts and homicides of Death Proof. Moreover, as with Bill, any misogynistic tendencies in any of the characters tend to end badly for the perpetrators, and the strong women come out on top. Not a major issue for me, but it's now become such a formulaic element from Tarentino that it felt pressed in my face.
As it was necessary to switch off most reasoning capacity in order to enjoy either film, though, this wasn't terribly troubling at the time. Given the subject matter and the underlying experience being paid tribute to here, I'm not necessarily laying all or even any of that at the filmmakers' feet as mistakes - in many instances they were plainly having fun with comically-compressed character and action movie cliches.
There are some gore and muck for gross-out's sake only scenes in the Planet Terror feature, I have to add. The worst by far is an attempted rape scene Tarentino played as one of the infected. His... equipment going drastically gooey, dripping and falling off was quite a bit more than I needed to keep a memory of.
Happily, the filmmakers took advantage of the grindhouse, low budget experience to occasionally have a film melt-down or missing reel judiciously skip a bit of each film. This may upset any horndogs looking forward to a lap dance scene in Death Proof, but I was both amused and relieved to be spared the waste of time it would have been.
Part of the fun of the experience was in the way they handled both the creation and linkage of the fake trailers, including "coming soon" and "our feature presentation" bumpers I haven't seen in thirty years, but which moviegoers of my vintage should immediately recognize. The made-up trailers ranged from the most fully-formed and believable period piece - Machete - to the lowest and most gratuitous, throw-away, B-minus elements of Werewolf Women of the SS. Aside from that were a couple of just over the top horror trailers for the movies Don't and Thanksgiving which wobbled with drunken amusement between parody and believability -- at least they will for those of us who saw some as many low budget horror shlockfests as I have.
Though I shouldn't have to say this, it's not a movie time for the kids. If you're going to see it, seeing it in a movie theater will heighten the experience, both because of the types of action films they are and because of they're attempting to recreate a shoddy movie theater experience.
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Apparently the film needs all the promotion it can get, with opening weekend box office not even breaking $12 million (and that with a production budget of $53M) and the usual expectation being a roughly 50% drop-off between opening weekend and the next. Easter weekend/spring break may have not been the best time for something that's so much not full family fare, which would help explain how even Are We Done Yet? managed to beat Grindhouse by over $3M. That, Meet the Robinsons and Blades of Glory were all at least seen to be better suited for holiday weekend family outings.
This upcoming week and weekend will tell the tale, I suppose. If it doesn't rebound now then their hopes for financial redemption will lie with the DVD market.
I did have a question: I was thumbing through the hardcover book about the film at the bookstore, and saw the latest Multiplex strip. My question is: for Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving" trailer, would that be a good time to take a bathroom break?
Good to see you emerging, Tony!
Much will depend upon what gets to you. The "Thanksgiving" trailer at its worst plays on juxtapositions of food and murder done using implements of and in the fashion of food prep. It's actually pretty funny, but it's definitely trying to push as many buttons as it can as it speeds up into a quick succession of disturbing scene snippets.
Honestly, if one makes it through the attempted rape scene in "Planet Terror", with Tarantino's bits dripping and dropping off his body from between his legs, then it's not likely any other gross-out image in this film is going to get to him. Still, different people have different buttons.
The most important thing to keep in mind in this respect with the entire Grindhouse experience is that almost everything is ultimately being played up over the top and very often for laughs. Except as a pop cultural historian and/or in the vein of a film student, it's not a movie that requires much thought to watch.