Sunday Review #4: Planet Terror

So as you might have possibly guessed, we've been watching movies that Adam wants to see of late.  I like this type of movie as well, but LoveFilm (similar to Netflix) doesn't allow you to actually order the queue, just prioritize movies into "high," medium," or "low."

This week's review is of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror.  This is not meant to be a review of the plot, but rather an examination of what Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were trying to do with their "grindhouse" concept.

So to start with Tarantino and Rodriguez both grew up with the "grindhouse" double-feature concept: going to see exploitation films that showed in cheap, crappy cinemas.  Rodriguez (or Tarantino, don't remember which) explained that these films, instead of creating thousands of prints for wide, simultaneous nationwide release (like what we have now--think Titanic for example), they would print only 10-20 copies or so, and those copies would travel around the country, stopping in a different city every week.  This meant if it started in say, New York, the print would be clean and decent, but as it travelled around and was played more and more, it got grittier and dirtier and damaged (being played in poorly maintained machines didn't help).

Both directors loved going to see this type of movie--often zombie or slasher flicks (or something similar).  But as this concept doesn't really exist anymore, they decided to team up and do it themselves--but in wide release.  It's been a while since it released into the cinemas, but I believe that Grindhouse as a film was less that successful, so it was split into its separate parts, Death Proof and Planet Terror.  I haven't seen Death Proof (yet), so I can't comment on that one, so though I imagine it is similar in many aspects, I wouldn't know.

Planet Terror is a zombie style flick, and (intentionally) not a particularly good one.  That said, I think it captured what it was trying to be admirably.  The acting and the script were fairly cheesy, and since I've seen several of the actors in other roles, I know they can act well.  There were the obligatory T&A scenes, lots of violence towards others--zombies or not--an attempted rape where the girl kicks ass, the bad guy who's a good guy/hero who dies, and a chick with a gun for a leg.  Yeah, that was a combination of both awful and awesome.  Definitely an exploitation film.

The picture was gritty, and looked as though it was on cheap film (Rodriguez shoots all of his films digitally now).  I felt like they did a good job slightly undersaturating or oversaturating the color of the film (it varied); it wasn't overt, but looking at it from a film-making perspective you could see that it was there.  Really, every aspect of the film felt like one of those awful Saturday afternoon movies that you get when there's nothing on, or the late night cable TV/local access station that shows really really bad TV and movies (usually no more recent that the 1970s) because they can't afford better.  Rodriguez wanted to capture a mood, and I think he did so well.  It's a bad movie, but it's a bad movie that's not that bad.  It's funny in places, and you could do a lot worse.  And given that the guys were trying to pay homage to particular genre and experience, they did a great job.  The movie was better that more exploitation films: the guys wanted to live up to the promise of the posters, something that the "real" exploitation films never did.

I think they beat the "standard" set by the original Grindhouse poster (image here), in part because I think they set the standard low.  However, they did achieve (for me, at least) one of their purposes: fake trailers were also made as part of this project, inserted before each movie.  Included on the Planet Terror DVD was the trailer for Machete, which actually looked really funny.  Still bad, but funny.  The hope Tarantino and Rodriguez had was that fans would want the trailers turned into full movies.  I would definitely see Machete, so I think they won on that score.

On a side note, people who know me know I swear.  A lot.  Worse than most sailors.  All I have to say is this: watch an interview of Quentin Tarantino sometime.  Wow... (a lot of my info for this came from an extra on the DVD--the Q&A session Rodriguez and Tarantino held at ComicCon 2006).