Matt Raub, back again with more faux knowledge about moving pictures and the land that makes them. I wish this visit could be more joyful, seeing as how I my summer was based around seeing Grindhouse, but sadly, I’m only half as excited as I had hoped to be.

Before we start, a little background on what the grindhouse is really all about. I’ve come across too many people in the past few months that haven’t a clue about the title, and I only fear the punch line will only go over those peoples’ heads. The idea of a grindhouse is when local theaters would screen cheap B movie pictures or exploitation films together in order to gain a larger audience. Such films had low-budget special effects, lack of plot, and amateur acting all summed up with a catchy, yet impressively bad title. Titles like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Lobster Man from Mars, and I Dismember Mama.

Now Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, two modern cult-cinema directors decided to take sort of a low blow at exploitation movies. Taking $50 million, they both wrote and directed two 90-minute exploitation films: Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof. They slapped them both together in a big chunk, including a handful of fake b-movie trailers by guest directors Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and Edgar Wright.

Now because this is essentially two films, I will give them both the respect they demand and review them separately, starting with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. This film held everything I wanted it to. The emotion, the cheesiness, and the random, unnecessary deaths. From titles to credits, I was either laughing, cringing in a good way, or both.

The premise of the film is that an evil army general (Bruce Willis) and a nutty biochemist (are there any other kind?) unleash a toxic gas on an unsuspecting Texas town, killing some and turning the rest into crazed infected cannibals, not zombies! There are only a few who are immune to the gas: a one-legged stripper (Rose McGowan) and her ex-boyfriend with a mysterious past (Freddy Rodriguez) and a handful of others.

The film is action packed with random explosions and ultra violence. But while it keeps the content very similar to classic exploitation films, the most important element is that the style is done to replicate the gritty, cheap, film stock that was what gave original grindhouse movies their flavor. This includes but is not limited to: poor voice dubbing, gritty, unfocused shots, missing frames, and even entire missing reels. By far, this was the one thing that kept the film together and kept the audience entertained.

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