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A real grind

Even trash film buffs will find this torturous
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July 4th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Tarantino saves the best for last with a seriously exciting car chase.
Death Proof

Directed by Quentin Tarantino
With Kurt Russell, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd and Zoe Bell

By Eric Larson
For the Post
The term “grindhouse” is geekspeak for a particular breed of American film that had its heyday, if you could call it that, from the 1960s, roughly, to the 1980s. The old beat-up reels were shown in the rundown burlesque houses and drive-in theaters of major U.S. cities, often as part of a double feature.
Since their demise, these exploitation, blaxploitation, sexploitation, zombie and gearhead flicks have achieved considerable cult status, becoming the nostalgic subject of fan-boy film festivals devoted to trash cinema; a cultural studies thesis or two; and now, a 190-minute double feature released in the States as Grindhouse, featuring grindhouse homages by directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
The films — Planet Terror (Rodriguez) and Death Proof (Tarantino) — are being shown separately in Europe on the premise that a double feature is a crumb of Americana that most mainstream European audiences would be unable to appreciate. That said, even American audience members under 35 will find themselves a bit young to fully apprehend the wink-wink of watching faux trailers in advance of a double feature, or the nudge-nudge of watching two films derivative, in substance and style, of a genre that died around the time VHS buried Beta.
Death Proof, the first of the films to arrive in Prague, begins (as does Rodriguez’s) with two trailers — one directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), the other by Eli Roth (Hostel) — advertising two nonexistent slasher films. The trailers, though transparently parodistic, faithfully recreate the dull and gritty look of the real McCoy, and are good for a quick laugh.
Death Proof itself opens with a group of twentysomething film industry women, inexplicably outfitted in 1970s haircuts and attire, lounging around in a car, reciting the kind of banal and meandering dialogue for which Tarantino is so well-known. We then suffer through a visit to a restaurant, where Tarantino’s camera circles the girls like a stalker — neither advancing the plot nor deepening the characters — and then on to a bar, which mercifully begets the beginning of the end.
At the bar, we meet Stuntman Mike (a creepily convincing Kurt Russell), a sadomasochistic teetotaler whose method for getting kicks is the catalyst for the film’s finale, the moment we’ve all been waiting for — the murder, the revenge, the PVC piping, the pissed-off chicks! Oh, and one hell of a great car chase.
The chase is truly outstanding, and were the film to end with a single crash, a ringing gun shot, a final triumphant punch or one of the cars exploding at the bottom of a canyon, the whole thing would be partially redeemed.
But no, Tarantino insists on torturing his audience, along with one of his characters, in a manner that I suspect even a real grindhouse director would have been too tasteful to employ. Perhaps the ending is meant to be read as a feminist polemic, a backlash against the traditional subjugation of women in trashy films. If so, it is misplaced.
Death Proof could have been Tarantino’s way of sharing with his (mostly younger) audience his enthusiasm for a genre that’s dead and gone. Which would have been a noble deed. Instead, he begins the film too subtly, ends it too harshly and leaves his audience with nothing but a mild case of nausea to take away.
Eric Larson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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