Robert Rodriguez and I started off on the wrong foot. The first movie of his that I saw was Desperado, and I didn’t like Desperado. I remember being all psyched about seeing it when it first came out, only to be greatly disappointed later in life when I finally did get to see it, thanks in no small part to the fact that I thought the majority of the movie was going to be guys in mariachi suits with machine gun guitar cases shooting each other for 90 minutes. I think this was the moment I realized that trailers are teasing whores who promise the best fuck of your life only to give you a quick dry hand job then demanding $200 before they have their pimp boyfriend beat you senseless with his cyborg hand and goldfish bearing platform shoes. This pain was eased after finally seeing From Dusk Till Dawn, but then came back harder with all the kiddie fare the man shat out for the next decade or so. I then had hopes that Once Upon A Time In Mexico would redeem it’s master, only to have the hope squeezed out of me in toothpaste tube proportions. Then came Sin City to salve the wound.
Now we have with us Planet Terror, Bobby R’s contribution to his Tarantino collaboration Grindhouse. Cherry (Rose McGowan) is a go-go dancer outta Texas who’s fed up with her job and wants something new. Perhaps a career as a stand-up comedian? Anyway, the little lady runs into her ex-boyfriend Wray at the local BBQ dive and they may be sparking up a renewed interest in each other. Meanwhile, Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) is in the process of leaving her husband Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) and running away with her son to go and live with her hot girlfriend. Then, while all of this is going on, at a nearby military base we have US Army Lieutenant Muldoon (Bruce Willis) who’s trying to make a deal with Middle Eastern bio-terrorist/businessman Abby (Naveen Andrews)… who has a real mean streak and a very unhealthy hobby that, well, let’s just say it’s full of natural protein…
Well, things go sour between Muldoon and Abby and the experimental gas that Abby’s been working on is released into the atmosphere, melting the faces of his henchmen and turning everybody in mutated, flesh eating maniacs! As with any standard zombie plague epic, it’s ghouls gone wild as the monsters make their way outward, infecting everybody they can get their bubbling hands on and causing general mayhem, including one victim who can only be described as “Mmmmm, Fergalicious”. The big thing that everybody’s looking forward to here though is the loss of Cherry’s leg, as it results in the equal parts absurdly hilarious and obscenely cool “machine gun leg” that’s become the movie’s most infamous characteristic. Don’t expect it right away though, because there’s actually a progression to said machine gun leg and, when it’s all said and done, even the machine gun leg isn’t the last trick in Cherry’s book of artificial limb weaponry…
Planet Terror is a total action flick “Penthouse Forums” lust letter from Robert Rodriguez to horror movies. Besides the obvious genre comparison to other zombie plague movies, there are plenty of other references that Bobby tosses into the mix for the boils and ghouls to get giddy about when they start pointing them out to each other, including Wray’s reference to his toe truck as “Killdozer”, a painful homage to Fulci’s famous “splinter to the eye” gore whore orgasm circa Zombie, and a great little death scene for Tom Savini himself that pays service to the man’s gory dismemberment work in both Dawn and Day of the Dead. This is how you make a horror tribute movie, not by beating us over the head with non-stop dialogue dedicated to sucking the collective cocks of the old guard, but by giving your tributes celluloid form so those deserving of them can get the thrill of the old “inside joke”.
The gore is excessive and there were a few scenes of pustule-popping action that had one of my movie-going friends literally choking back her lunch. We get incredibly graphic and detailed exploding heads, severed limbs, gun shots wounds, stabbings, the aforementioned pustule poppings, bodies splattered across cars, broken bones, hollowed out heads, and every kind of savage violence you could ask for to be done to a human body. Be warned though, because a dog gets killed in a very brief but very violent manner and there are barf friendly scenes of diseased and melting genitalia. There’s also one death that would be really depressing to see if it weren’t for the fact that you can’t help but laugh in the wacky “oh man, I knew that was gonna happen!” sense.
The characters are cheesy and I never really “cared” about any of them enough to say that I was sad to see them go when it was their time, as their deaths more often than not contributed more to the movie than their actual roles. However, I do have to say that Rodriguez disappointed me as a paying customer to see two certain females live to the last reel, and that’s all I’ll say about that. The story itself isn’t important, just as it’s not in any zombie plague film. As long as we know what started the whole thing, I don’t give a shit so long as I’ve got excessive violence and struggle to pull me through to the end! If you really wanted to though, I guess you could try pinning some kind of morality or social commentary crap on it like so many movie geeks often enjoy doing. Acting wise, Josh Brolin is a beautifully sleezy mofo, Freddy Rodriguez is a keg of whoop-ass in a 40oz bottle, Quentin Tarantino is an unlikable dick bag (which makes his pain and suffering all the more pleasant), Michael Parks is awesome and criminally underused, Jeff Fahey had me thinking he was channeling a mix of Tremors’s Bert Gummer and TCM 2’s Drayton Sawyer (which was a good thing) and Michael Biehn was fun to watch as the local curmudgeon Sheriff. Everybody else is, well, good enough to get me through the movie. McGowan’s okay as the lead, but aside from the running joke with her unipod gimmick, I could take her or leave her.
As for the Grindhouse gimmick of beating up the movie to make it look like an old exploitation reel, Rodriguez definitely runs with the concept more here than Tarantino does with the later installment, Death Proof. The film gets grainy, scratched up, washes out, breaks and skips a lot more and I enjoyed the feeling. I’m obviously too young to have any kind of “nostalgia” feeling from the effect, as I wasn’t around for the fabled “42nd Street Grindhouse” days, but I’ve suffered through enough low rent theaters and video nasty bootlegs in my time to have an appreciation for what was being attempted. Each of the two movies featured in Grindhouse include a “Missing Reel” gag, and all I can say is that I hope the scene “lost” from Planet Terror was actually filmed as some point and will make it into the DVD’s special features section.
What more is there to say? See Grindhouse. Even if you don’t have the patience for a 3 hour feature, at least do yourself the favor of seeing Planet Terror and the faux movie trailers before heading home for you 9pm bedtime, grandma.
Speaking of the fake trailers, I’m going to talk about two of those here and the other two in my Death Proof review. The first trailer is for Machete, a non-existent ‘70s exploitation action flick that wasn’t directed by Robert Rodriguez, didn’t star “#3 on my top ten list of all-time bad-ass movie motherfuckers” Danny Trejo and didn’t feature Cheech Marin as a shotgun wielding priest! Our title anti-hero is an assassin hired to kill a US political figure that intends to deport all of the nation’s Mexican populace back to their homes South of the border. Machete (named after his weapon of choice), is of course double crossed and must now take down the honky assholes that tried to set him up. It’s like Shooter, only liberally breeded with a heavy dose of ‘70s sleeze and a Taco Grande sized platter of Mexploitation. If I rated trailers, I would give Machete five stars and say that it definitely needs to be turned into a full feature, should Grindhouse 2 see the light of day.
Our second trailer is the Rob Zombie heralded Werewolf Women of the SS; a Nazi-sploitation flick about Hitler’s secret werewolf super soldier experiments that would combine Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS with The Howling and would star Udo Kier, Sheri Moon-Zombie, Bill Moseley and Tom Towles if Rob Zombie could stuff them all into his Delorean and take them back to 1974 to actually make this movie. Though the concept sounds great on paper and I think Zombie could make something like this work if given a full feature to play with, the trailer itself lacked the thrill I was hoping for. Maybe it was the cheap werewolf costumes or the fact that people like Bill Moseley and Udo Kier need more than 10 seconds of screen time to work their magic, but whatever the reason, this wasn’t a trailer that made me chew my talons off in anticipation of seeing this movie actually get made. I have faith in Zombie and his cast though, should this ever merit a full length feature. Three stars for the trailer, but FIVE stars for Nicholas Cage's cameo as Fu Manchu. I hate the man much less now than I did yesterday...
