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Too much for one movie

Trash doesn't come any better than Planet Terror
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 22nd, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Gas, food, zombies, next exit. The good people of Texas are coming our way.
Grindhouse: Planet Terror

Directed by Robert Rodriguez
With Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Bruce Willis, Michael Parks, Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton

I spent my childhood in the ’70s watching grindhouse features at the local dumps and drive-ins, and, as I was born in the same decade as directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, chances are that we saw the same shows. I knew of Cleopatra Jones (“She’s 10 miles of hard road”) before I knew of Anthony and Cleopatra.
For those who never had the grindhouse experience (and don’t know Buford Pusser from Foxy Brown), the Tarantino-Rodriguez Grindhouse package might not make much sense, as it is a pure homage to poverty-row cinema.
The genius of the enterprise, lost on the rest of the world, was to create an authentic double-feature complete with snack-barlures and faux trailers of coming attractions, as well as re-employing the old psychedelic cinema lead-ins and rating cards from the era.
What’s arrived here (and elsewhere in Europe) are the film’s two features (Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror) carved up and shown separately, while the trailers have been scrapped, except for Rodriguez’s own future feature, Machete, starring Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin, which starts Planet Terror.
There’s an irony here, I suppose, as Grindhouse apes the quality of the old grindhouse fare stock — grainy, distressed celluloid, badly spliced repairs leading to odd jumps, even missing reels. That it arrives here in a mangled form could be seen as part of a larger joke, though I hope some enterprising cinema such as Světozor or Aero will screen it complete.
Besides the studied amateurishness of the Grindhouse features’ look, Death Proof and Planet Terror seem like classics from the dawn of the genre. Both directors bow before the muse of carnage, and are proselytizers of trash. But, unlike their sadistic sidekick Eli Roth, there’s a street-wise wit to their work.
If Death Proof is the bastard spawn of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill, Planet Terror is Flesh Eaters meets Escape from New York. They are saturnalias of shock, with all the malign energy of transgressive movies.
Film geeks have their own private grindhouse lexicon that’s as sophisticated as an arcane phobia/philia chart: Blaxploitation, sexploitation, splatter, zombie, hicksploitation. It’s all in Planet Terror.
In a part of Texas not served by interstates, a sad go-go dancer goes through her kicks and grinds at the local strip shack. The leggy Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) hands in her notice after her set and hits the road, only to be sideswiped by a convoy of army trucks heading to the local military base.
On the base, a rogue scientist, Abby (Naveen Andrews), meets the equally off-the-radar Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis), a veteran of the Afghanistan War heading a band of soldiers who have all been hit with a lethal toxin that makes their skin break out into boils and creates a hunger for human flesh. Abby possesses the antidote.
Still, the toxin gets out, and soon the back roads of Texas are swarming with starving zombies. The heroes — the local sheriff (Michael Biehn), his barbecue dive–owning brother (Jeff Fahey), a bevy of eminently braless, Russ Meyerish babes and Death Proof’s Dr. Block (Marley Shelton) — are led by the now one-legged Cherry (“I was going to be a standup comedian!”) and her dodgy but noble ex-boyfriend, El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez).
Running wounded and armed, this sweat-shivering army goes through 10 kinds of hell off the hard roads of the Lone Star State, and into the lowlands of cinema — driven by a bad synth soundtrack as much as anything else. In one of the film’s greatest splat-schtick moments, Cherry’s missing leg is replaced with a machine-gun (a wild riff perhaps on the gun-heeled stilettos in the posters for the ’70s Angie Dickinson epic Big Bad Mama).
Rodriguez’s ending is the perfect hippie coda to the orgy of poor taste that leads to it. The performances, especially McGowan (also excellent as Pam in Death Proof) and Freddy Rodriguez, are half the fun of this out of control joy ride.
Yes, it’s all trash. But the entertaining Hairspray is, after all, trash tamed. Grindhouse, to quote the tagline for Meyer’s Supervixens, is “too much for one movie.”
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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