This review has been a long time coming, stewing in my head... Without a shred of regret, I can tell you that this movie is an utter clusterfuck of incomptent execution and sub-literate idiocy.
I went in with the lowest of expectations and I was still surprised. Rodriguez's Planet Terror was where I believed the worst moments of the film would derive from, but I was wrong.
All in all, Planet Terror was as stupid as it looked. The very idea of a machine gun-legged woman killing everything in her path was... well, fucking retarded beyond imagining. The sad fact is, though, that it wasn't all that bad, at least in comparison to Death Proof. Sure, Rodriguez's writing was as terrible as ever, the acting he gets out of his actors was stiff and unimpressive, his casting was not always great, the subject matter was silly, but at least he managed some decent grain to the film and attempted to make it fun. Attempted. Really, though, it was just fucking stupidity heaped upon stupidity until the idea of a woman with an M-16 for a leg seemed completely reasonable. I can assure you that the very viewing of the movie made me dumber, a fact that I'm rather ashamed of, as I participated willingly, mainly so I could write this review.
The zombie opener was certainly pulpy, though I don't think any part of it mimiced the grindhouse quality of 70's films, unless anything with blood and tits can be considered "grindhouse". Instead, you have an intensely glossy multi-million dollar movie that's made to look somewhat shitty and inept instead of the directors just trying to make grindhouse films on restrained budgets.
Despite the constant head-shaking and "are you fucking kidding me?" that the film elicited, it was not the worst of it and, weeks later, didn't seem as bad as it probably was. The neverending string of zombie shoot-outs and somewhat abused character actors leads to nothing more than an escape and an end from the interminable mess.
The greatest crime of the film was Tarantino's Death Proof, terrible and entirely fucked in every way. Quintin Tarantino doesn't even seem to get the very movies that his ever-increasingly-more-mediocre films masterbatorally pay homage to. He attempts to mimic the style of films like Duel, but his pathetic aping is nothing more than vulgar and stupid regugitation of his own work, his fame and cadre of dick-sucking sycophants obviously giving him the idea that he can actually make whatever bullshit pops into his head while he's on the toilet and it will be genius.
This film rolls out the fucktarded plot with a group of loudmouthed women delivering awful, cookie-cutter Tarantino dialogue, like an unrefined Reservoir Dogs without the style, bringing them to a bar to drink like fiends and party for the first 30 minutes of the movie, until they meet our supposed villain, Stuntman Mike, who talks to the girls, kills one, and, in the only scene of real merit, runs head-on into their car, killing all of the girls.
Then the movie starts over again with a different set of girls and another 30 minutes of pointless Tarantino conversations. It's like a Groundhog Day nightmare from hell. We sit through another set of strongly feminine heroines trying to show us how women can be multi-dimensional in the most ham-fisted way before finally returning to the "plot". Stuntman Mike returns again to threaten three of the women, who give him a good run for his money.
A viewer may notice at this point that the two plots are in no way really connected, the first seeming to exist only to mirror the second and reveal to us how horrible a person Stuntman Mike then is. That this couldn't be done without 30 minutes of stupid bitches delivering tiresome and idiotic dialogue is a testament to how bad all of Tarantino's ideas in fact are.
The unimpressive plot finally comes to its cartoonish and idiotic conclusion, giving me much cause to wish death upon Tarantino and his entire family.
Really, the only parts that echo the 70's feel of grindhouse exploitation films were the opening credits of each of the two movies. Everything after was a waste of time and money and the filmmakers would have been better off filming it on a grindhouse budget, perhaps three or four million dollars.
In the end, the two movies were made by stupid people for stupid people and represent the lowness that cinema can sink to when we give too much creative freedom to self-styled auteurs who know nothing about what makes a film good.
The upside: the fake grindhouse trailers were all rather inventive and amusing and Eli Roth's Thanksgiving showed us exactly how to mimic and pay homage properly to the low-budget gems of the 70's. Perhaps if the filmmakers had learned some lessons from Roth, the movie would have been entertaining.
Instead, the two hours and 45 minutes around the trailers is a waste.
