Quentin Tarantino comes in with the second feature of Grindhouse and, unlike Planet Terror, which throws you action and gore from start to finish, Death Proof makes you earn that privilege by sitting through a lot of characterization and dialogue first. I’ve never had a problem with Tarantino’s movies, I just hate the man himself because he’s a spazzy little piss-ant that should never be allowed to do interviews or step foot in the general public. But, if I was going to be slowly driven insace by listening to movie dialogue until it pulled a Chinese Water Torture on my frontal lobe, I’d want it to be written by either Tarantino or Kevin Smith.
Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is, well, a former stuntman in case you didn’t catch that part of his name. Mike used to do a lot of “falling of horses” work in the old days of TV westerns before falling back on car crash stunts when he ran out of actors to look like. But, in this modern day of Hollywood penny pinching bullshit like computer graphics imaging, jobs are scarce for guys like Mike. With all this free time on his hands, Mike’s of course got plenty of opportunities to find new ways to keep himself entertained. Whereas most guys would simply work on their porn collection or take up a hobby like wood burning, Mike finds a new fetish in killing women by getting them into violent car wrecks the likes of which no one could ever possibly walk away from, this way it can never really be seen as anything more than a bad auto wreck and talks of stuff like “premeditated murder” are immediately followed with things like “no concrete evidence”. But how does Stuntman Mike pull off such a thing without getting himself killed in the process? Turns out that stuntmen can super reinforce a car in a way that guarantees the driver will not be killed should the car be otherwise destroyed. This method is called “death proofing”… yes kids, we have ourselves a title.
Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), Kim (Tracie Thoms), Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Zoe (real life stuntwoman Zoe Bell as herself!) are four friends looking for fun. Ab, Kim and Lee are all on break from their current jobs on the set of the latest Lindsey Lohan tripe and that gives them time to hang out with their pal Zoe who’s in visiting from New Zealand. Seems that while she’s here, Zoe plans to live out her lifelong dream of riding on the hood of a car that’s the exact make and model of her panty peeler fantasy ride from the movie Vanishing Point. It just so happens that such a car is being offered for sale by one of the locals in the Tennessee area where the ladies are residing and, after a convincing conversation with Ab, the slack-jawed stereotype lets the ladies take it out for a spin. What starts off as a dream stunt job for Zoe turns into a car chase nightmare when good old Stuntman Mike, out of the hospital and with his newly death proofed Chevy Nova (complete with Convoy duck hood ornament) ready and raring for fresh lady flesh, makes his presence known to the girls at the most inconvenient of times. What follows is one of the greatest car chase finales since The Road Warrior.
As mentioned before, the movie’s a bit talky. Since Grindhouse is over three hours long and people are going to be begging for an opportunity to hit the restroom, by best recommendation would be to empty the reservoirs during the first 20 minutes of so of this movie. If you love Tarantino’s writing you might want to ignore what I just said, but if you’re not the type who absolutely must see this kind of thing, heed my words. I could live with seeing everything before the first car accident trimmed down considerably, then leaving the last half of the movie as is to be honest, but that’s just me. Despite that, the latter half of the flick make sitting through the first half so worth it.
Kurt Russell has as much fun playing his role as Tarantino probably had directing the whole movie. The man runs the range from funny to creepy to charming to pathetic and he does it all with a smile. It’s a big difference from his grim and raspy turns as Snake Plissken and he’s nothing if not a blast to watch… sorry, “blast” was the best word I could come up with when typing this… The cast of gals are all having a lot of fun here too and it shows. Zoe Bell should definitely mix in more actual acting roles with her stunt work (she was Uma Thurman’s double for the Kill Bill movies) and she looks like she’s genuinely having a pisser of a time with her role here. Tracie Thoms is the definition of “crazy bitch” as she hoots, hollers and curses her way through the last 30 minutes of the movie and makes me wish I was cool enough to hang out with her. As for Rasario Dawson, I’ve fallen in love with her all over again since she made me do so in Clerks II. She’s cool, she’s sweet, she’s hot, she’s fucking adorable, and, when it gets down to it, she’s a fucking bruiser! Her best moment? Wait till about two seconds after “The End” pops up on the screen and you’ll see what I’m talking about. As with Planet Terror, everybody else did their job and that’s about all I can say about that. Eli Roth (who directed the Thanksgiving trailer I’ll be mentioning later) and Tarantino himself have small roles too, Quentin as a friendly bartender and Roth as a patron at said bar trying to get his ovarian target for the night drunk enough to take him home with her. Can’t say I blame him though, as I can only imagine the looks he gets when he tells chicks, “Yeah, I’m the guy who made Hostel!”.
Aside from the two or three hundred movie references Tarantino drops throughout the dialogue (you’d think he was making a commission on DVD sales from these things…), I’m sorry to say that I’m not a follower of car chase flicks, so many of the tribute pieces were probably lost on me. For instance, if my mother-in-law hadn’t pointed out that the chrome duck hood ornament on Mike’s car was an homage to a similar one used in the movie Convoy, I never would have known. The one thing that I did pick up on (at least I think so…) was a scene where Stuntman Mike plows through a roadside movie marquee advertising a double feature for Scream 4 and a Wolf Creek sequel. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong in thinking this, but I’m gonna say that this is a little tribute to Wes Craven’s now classic use of a torn Jaws poster in the original The Hills Have Eyes as saying that the latter was a superior scare flick in comparison to the former. Did Tarantino use this to say that the double feature in Grindhouse is superior to an imaginary double feature of these other non-existent movies, or am I just reading too much into it?
As far as the Grindhouse gimmick goes here, Tarantino shies away from the liberal use of film scratches and superficial burns that we saw in Planet Terror, opting instead for other loving faux mistakes like hiccups in the audio track and a couple of frames missing from the reel that cause cars to suddenly disappear, small pieces of conversation to be left out and people to magically teleport from one place to another. He also does a great bit with the opening credits, in which the movie’s original fake original title (I think it was something like Thunderball) is clipped out for a generic looking still of the alternate title (that of course being Death Print) printed in white on a base black background. That was a definite favorite moment for me. This movie’s “Missing Reel” moment is a lap dance scene that I couldn’t care less about missing to be honest, so if this was never shot and doesn’t make it into the DVD, I won’t mind.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant: I recommend Grindhouse 100%. And now, for the “coming attractions”…
I’m going to talk about two of Grindhouse’s fake trailers here and the other two in my review for Planet Terror, so if you haven’t check that out yet, do so when you’re done here. The first trailer I’m going to mention (which is actually the third trailer shown throughout the length of the double feature) is Don’t. In a hilarious lampooning of the infamous Don’t… movies of the sleazy ‘70s (Don’t Go In the Basement, Don’t Go In the Woods, Don’t Open the Door, etc.), Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright previews a fake movie for us about three people who are trapped in a haunted house, including Nick Frost and (I think) Simon Pegg of both Shaun and Hot Fuzz. Pushing the joke all the way, the trailer is entirely narration with none of the actors getting off any actual lines, a trick used by US releasing companies 30 years ago when they didn’t want potential audience members to know that the European movies they were releasing under new names were filled with accent heavy casts, fearing it would turn people off. Much like Shaun of the Dead, this trailer’s literally brilliant and uses the underlying humor of its source material to full comedy effect. If I were the kind of guy who rated trailers, this would be a five star all the way!
Our final trailer is from Cabin Fever horror wunderkind Eli Roth, who brings us a parody of ‘70s and ‘80s gimmick slasher movies called Thanksgiving that seems to be equal parts Halloween and My Bloody Valentine jokes. The trailer goes for total shock factor, dick slapping everybody with graphically implied sex scenes and over-the-top gore. To put it in terms of audience reaction, everybody was laughing for Don’t and immediately groaning and gasping as loud and painful as possible for Thanksgiving. Severed heads aplenty here, along with Cinemax level softcore scenes of chicks giving out blow jobs like they were Christian propaganda flyers, a disturbing scene of a topless cheerleader on a trampoline getting a very sharp alternative to her Tampax getting shoved up her birth canal, and a baffling final scene of someone cooked and stuff like a giant turkey before a very brief glimpse of what looks like Roth himself being sodomized at a dinner table… what the fuck. Roth has shown he likes shock value over “artistic vision” and I’d definitely watch Thanksgiving as a feature just to say I sat through it without blinking. But, though I can appreciate graphic violence and sex, the actual urge to see something like this isn’t as inspired as I think the man was trying to do. Four-out-of-five.
