Flicker Fusion

My recent MovieMail blog, Don’t Bisect Grindhouse, lamented the decision to split the not-yet-released Robert Rodriguez–Quentin Tarantino double-bill extravaganza in Europe and release Tarantino’s segment on its own. It argued, before I had seen the film, that cutting Grindhouse clean in half was against the spirit of the enterprise.

I’ve now had the opportunity to see it on the big screen and I still feel the bisection is fundamentally wrong: ‘double bill’ is very much its raison d’etre. However, I do now have to concede that some pretty severe editing is necessary.

Grindhouse kicks off with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a sci-fi horror yarn about Iraq war veterans infected with a zombie disease. Cue lots of splattery shoot-outs, bubbling latex and projectile blood-letting. It’s fun for a few minutes, especially in its evocation of crummy low-budget film-making (scratchy footage, poor acting, lame dialogue). But it soon become immensely tedious, largely because, when the joke’s worn off, we’re left with a deliberately poor film. That’s OK for 30 minutes, not for 90. And very soon you’re thinking, hasn’t Rodriguez done this better before, in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn?

Tarantino’s episode is another matter entirely. Death Proof, which starts as an oddball buddy-girl flick before descending into stops-out, auto-collision madness, is in a class of its own. The first half is like the love child of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Death Race 2000. To that end, the fake scratches and ‘missing reels’ seem a bit redundant: this is beyond grindhouse, and it is quite hypnotic.

But after the jolting first-act denouement, Death Proof also goes downhill, when Tarantino tries to retread the first scenario with four far less appealing actors (one, Zoe Bell, a real-life stuntwoman, gives the most grating performance in a Tarantino film since, well, Tarantino himself.) This second half does, however, offer an impressive, if overlong, car chase, before climaxing in an orgy of female violence that strikes parallels with Marleen Gorris’s radical Dutch film, A Question of Silence (I did say it was unclassifiable!). This heady mixture, of course, will guarantee Death Proof attention when it is released as a solo picture in September, but the movie is even less likely to carry its second-act flaws with extra scenes added.

So here’s what I would do: boil Planet Terror down to 45 minutes, discard the second half of Death Proof (yes, even the car chase) and release Grindhouse as a double bill of two shortish features. The fake cinema ads and half of the trailers could be dispensed with (Kentucky Fried Movie did these 30 years ago), with the exception of Edgar Wright’s funny Don’t and Eli Roth’s note-perfect Graduation Day/Prom Night pastiche, Thanksgiving (which, as the cliche goes, is almost worth the admission price alone). That’d make an entertaining 100 minutes, and retain something the grindhouse experience.

As it stands, 3 hours 11 minutes is certainly too long to watch two directors goofing around.