Grindhouse
April 6 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 14
Every act of creativity is an act of reaction and recreation. There is no Palestrina without Gregorian plainsong coming before it, and if there is no Palestrina there is no Bach, and if there is no Bach there is no Beatles. Every artist takes inspiration from the work that came before them that they loved and incorporates bits and pieces from it into their own work. Think of something you love that’s highly original, and I bet you dollars to donuts there’s writing on it out there piecing apart everything it rips off some way or another. This raises a question. When an artist seeks to create something and takes inspiration from past work, which is the more successful endeavor: the artist who succeeds at recreating that thing perfectly? Or the artist who fails but creates something else interesting in the process? The 2007 theatrical experience Grindhouse provides exactly such a comparison point.
Grindhouse takes its title from grindhouse theaters, a type of movie house (often a single screen) that showed c list genre pictures. While the term dates back to the 1920s, grindhouses started becoming ubiquitous in American cities after WW2 at the dawn of television as a dominant entertainment form. As television arose, where mainstream big budget cinema started going for larger-than-life stories that television couldn’t accommodate like historical epics and giant musicals, low budget genre cinema started going for cheap thrills, often incorporating gore and nudity as incentives for viewers. Grindhouses were cheap, and would commonly have a pair of movies on the bill so that patrons could get multiple movies worth of entertainment for a similar price to a single ticket at the mainstream cinema across the street.
While most grindhouse movies are (rightfully) forgotten, the format was likely how many American moviegoers first saw films that are now regarded as classics of foreign cinema, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) or Dario Argento’s Susperia (1977). Grindhouses were also instrumental in breaking the careers of indie filmmakers. The debut pictures by Sam Raimi, John Waters, and Joel & Ethan Coen all played at grindhouses well before they played at normie theaters. The rise of home video largely destroyed the grindhouse, as viewers who preferred their entertainment to have tits and viscera preferred to enjoy them in the comfort of their own homes. By the turn of the 21st century most every grindhouse had either closed or been converted into mainstream movie houses or rep theaters. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had both bonded over their shared love of going to grindhouse theaters after meeting in the early 90s, and decided in 2007 to use their clout as filmmakers to make a collective double feature as an ode to the forgotten grindhouse experience, hence the single-ticket double bill experience of Planet Terror and Death Proof.
Planet Terror is the story of a motley crew of people at the exposure point of “DC2”, a deadly neurotoxin developed by the US military that turns people into zombies. Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) is a go-go dancer who’s looking to quit and start a new life. “El Wray” (Freddy Rodriguez) is her ex, a tow truck driver with a mysterious past. J.T. is a restaurateur who runs “The Bone Shack”, a BBQ joint, and is looking to perfect his sauce recipe, and Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) is an anaesthesiologist who’s looking to escape her marriage and her hospital full of zombies. Between them, a handful of other survivors, and a hell of a lot of guns and firepower they attempt to fight their way out of their zombie-ridden small Texas town to safety.
Death Proof is the story of “Stuntman” Mike (Kurt Russell), a psychopath who drives heavily modified muscle cars, using them to stalk and kill young women. After killing a radio DJ (Sydney Poitier) and her friends (Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd) in Austin, he relocates to middle Tennessee, stalking a trio of below-the-line film workers (Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and stunt performer Zoë Bell as a fictional version of herself) shooting a b-movie in and around the town of Lebanon. What he doesn’t realize is that they’re as good if not better at stunt driving as he is, causing the hunter to become the hunted.
Both films in Grindhouse’s double feature experience have very clear antecedents they’re referencing. Planet Terror is a schlock horror gorefest, with clear nods to trashy, fun gross out cinema of the 70s and 80s like The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Assignment: Terror (1970). Death Proof literally puts its influences in the script, as the stunt performer characters wax rhapsodic about 70s carsploitation action movies like Gone In 60 Seconds (1974) and Vanishing Point (1971). The main difference between the two is that where one movie is a straight up facsimile of its influences, the other is a film that is influenced by but very different from its antecedents.
If the goal of Grindhouse was to make a pair of movies that felt exactly like going to a grindhouse theater in 1985, then Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror is the film that clearly succeeds at this goal. The movie feels like Rodriguez went through a Troma films box set with a pad of paper and wrote down all the little details he wanted to include and then jammed them into one film. The levels of gore are off the charts. The bio-zombie makeup effects are both corny looking and incredibly effective at their gross out goals. The action sequences are absurdly over-the-top, with bullets and causing limbs and cars to explode in clear defiance of physics, culminating in a climactic sequence where Cherry Darling’s amputated leg is replaced by an assault rifle that she can fire while standing on one leg using only the power of her mind. Oh and sometimes it fires rocket propelled grenades. The whole thing is incredibly stupid and is also top notch spectacle and camp.
Rodriguez also explicitly is celebrating the form of the grindhouse theater in his film. Brian Eno brilliantly expressed the power that a specific medium of art can have on its experience in his book The Year of Swollen Appendices
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
In the exact spirit of Eno’s description, Rodriguez purposefully recreates the imperfections of the grindhouse theatrical experience. He not only includes digitally inserted film scratches and audio pops and hiss indicative of a well worn film print, he specifically makes sure that the scratches get worse and worse and suddenly better at regular intervals, the exact way a work print that’s gone from theater to theater gets damaged at the end of the reel and then snaps back into less-damaged status at the beginning of the new reel. He mimics the way that a film development error can cause long stretches of film to be monochromatic due to individual colors not being developed in the final print. Most crucially for comic effect just as a sex scene between Cherry Darling and El Wray gets going, the image freezes and we see the frame distort the exact way an individual cell of film does when it’s locked in place and burned by the halogen lamp of the projector. The screen then reads “MISSING REEL” and the action immediately cuts to an action sequence with dialog suggesting that we’ve not only just missed the majority of the sex scene, but an exposition dump detailing El Wray’s backstory. We never learn El Wray’s backstory because of this artificial missing reel, and the artificiality of it is Rodriguez telling the audience that their experience is better for the lack of it. Doubtless Rodriguez himself saw some gorefest with a missing bit of exposition due to damaged filmstock, and he realized that whatever story his imagination was filling in was probably as good or better than what the film actually contained. The act of seeing the poorly preserved film in a shitty theater is the content just as much as the characters, plot, and spectacle. I bet if Rodriguez had been able to incorporate scents into the film he would have insisted that the movie smell like sweat and cigarettes to complete the theatrical experience.
Tarantino’s Death Proof on the other hand, clearly has some nods towards recreating the grindhouse experience, but mostly just feels like a Quentin Tarantino movie. The film has some of the same kind of medium simulation as Planet Terror but in no way to the same degree. There are artificial film scratches but not nearly as much nor as artfully placed. There’s a long monochrome segment for no discernable reason. The biggest way that Tarantino plays with the form is during the opening credits, where the title of the film is briefly seen to be “Thunder Bolt” before flashing to a plain black background with the plain white title “Death Proof”, a nod to the way exploitation and c-list genre films would commonly be retitled during their theatrical run to chase trends and/or seem more salacious, for example the 1971 film titled at times Zombies, Zombie Bloodbath, Voodoo Bloodbath, and I Eat Your Skin. Past that though the only real nods to the grindhouse aesthetic is the presence of 70s muscle cars and ultraviolence.
Death Proof has clear influence from both slasher movies where a psychopath picks off victims in spectacular shows of ultraviolence and 70s movies like White Lightning and Fury On Wheels where the entire MO of the filmmakers appears to be “we have cool cars and we want to do cool car stuff on screen”. Stuntman Mike is a psychopath who kills his victims in spectacular manner and there are cool 70s cars and cool car stuff is shown on screen. The film vastly differs from these though in the way it shows what it shows. Slasher films have rules of pacing and escalation. There’s only meaningfully one scene where Stuntman Mike actually succeeds at killing his victims, it’s just that he kills five of them at once. If this were a Wes Craven or John Carpenter joint, these five deaths would be stretched over the first hour of the film. Similarly, 70s car movies keep the action up. Smokey & The Bandit (1977) is in part remembered as the pinnacle of these films because of how much camera time is spent on cool cars doing cool car shit. Death Proof has a brief driving sequence culminating in the deaths of our first cohort of protagonists starting 45 minutes into its runtime, with additional cool car shit only coming in at the 90 minute mark. Admittedly at that 90 minute mark the entire remainder of the film’s 110 minute runtime is an extended car-based action sequence, and potentially if those 20 minutes of action had been spread out across the film’s runtime I wouldn’t be commenting on it, but it is unusual for a movie that’s ostensibly about a stunt car driver to not have any serious stunt driving for the first ¾ of its runtime.
In straying from these formulas though Tarantino has created an example of an entirely different kind of film. Where slasher and car films emphasize action, Death Proof emphasizes dialogue and character. Rare is the slasher movie where we get to know the victims and deeply understand what’s in their hearts, understanding minutiae around their dynamics of friendship, and truly getting to know them enough to mourn their deaths. Tarantino paints a vivid picture of both groups of women and who they are and what they’re about, far more than your average exploitation picture. Admittedly, they’re a kind of Tarantino idealized woman (young, conventionally attractive, hard partying, foul mouthed, and of course always willing to show feet on main), but they’re still well developed and earnestly remind me of many of the hard partying foul mouthed friends I had in my youth. In slowing his movie down Tarantino turns his car, violence, and vengeance picture into something more reminiscent of Robert Altman than Hal Needham. In many ways that’s the entire success of his career: taking the kinds of characters one might find in pulpy crime thrillers and gory kung fu films and fleshing them out to the point of becoming real people rather than “goon who shoots gun #3”.
In a Hollywood Reporter roundtable In 2012, Tarantino said that Death Proof is his worst movie. I kinda agree with him, but it’s only in the sense that if something is ranked inevitably one thing has to end up at the bottom. The film drags a little at times and honestly could benefit from a little less talk and a little more action, but boy howdy when it hits it hits, especially in that final act as Mike tries and fails to kill the stunt performers and ends up a pathetic blubbering mess as he realizes they’re capable of fighting back.
When I saw Grindhouse in a theater as a much younger man, I liked Planet Terror a little more than Death Proof, and the same feeling applies now, but in part I think that’s because as an art project Planet Terror fits a little better into the overall mission of Grindhouse than Death Proof. On the one hand it’s simultaneously impossible and rather silly to attempt to perfectly recreate the past, but on the other hand Roger Corman isn’t cranking out dozens of c-list movies a year to be played in down and dirty theaters in double bills at cutrate prices anymore. It’s fun to make something that isn’t made anymore. It’s like brewing beer with gruit as a bittering agent instead of hops to see what beer tasted like in the 13th century, or building a cabin without power tools to see if you’ve got it in you to build a home the way Honest Abe did. In this, Robert Rodriguez succeeds at his simulacrum excellently. But also I’ve seen Planet Terror twice now. I’ve seen Death Proof three times. Something I can’t quite place my finger on drew me back to the one and not the other, even if I feel like I like the one I’ve only seen twice more, and the one thing I can point to is the fact that Death Proof isn’t exactly a perfect simulation of a grindhouse movie. Maybe that failure to perfectly recreate art and instead creating something new is what creativity is all about.
Ratings:
Planet Terror: ★★★★★ Remove brain, put on Planet Terror, enjoy explosions.
Death Proof: ★★★★☆ For once it’s nice to see a misogynist asshole put in his place
Economics: Grindhouse opened at a disappointing #4, behind Are We Done Yet?, the sequel to the 2005 Ice Cube family comedy Are We There Yet? and ahead of the supernatural thriller The Reapening. The film(s) would go on to make $25 million at the domestic box office against its $67 million budget. The disappointing box office as a two-for-the-price-of-one double feature caused international distributors to split the film into two separate releases. The films would go on to make an additional $25 million worldwide and $40 million in home video sales, ultimately barely turning a profit.
Next Week: TBD
obviously I am a Death Proof enthusiast, loved this 🏎️