If you haven’t seen Grindhouse in theaters yet, you’ve probably at least seen the trailer. It’s hard to miss: the one where a girl has her leg amputated and replaced with an assault rifle – complete with a grenade launcher.
Grindhouse is not like any movie you’ve seen, partly because it’s actually two movies: The first is Planet Terror, a struggle against zombie infestation directed by Robert Rodriguez. The other film is Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, a slasher flick with Kurt Russell portraying a psycho stuntman with a death-proofed stunt car as his vixen-killing weapon of choice. Together, it’s three hours of nail-biting anxiety.
The directors, who are longtime friends and collaborators, were inspired by the grindhouse cinemas popular in the ’60s and ’70s. These inner-city theaters showed continuous double or triple features of “exploitation films,” a genre that relied on sensationalized images of gore, sex or kung fu to lure an audience.
Six Feet Under’s Freddy Rodriguez plays the protagonist and ex-boyfriend of machine-gun-legged Cherry (Rose McGowan) in Planet Terror. Rodriguez remembers his father taking him to grindhouses as a kid in Chicago, so he knew the idea behind the project well.
But this refreshed homage to the genre marks a step up from exploitation films of yore. “It’s the aspects that made the grindhouse movies cool – infused with the level of quality and actual filmmaking that Robert and Quentin bring to the table,” Rodriguez said in a recent conference call.
Planet Terror and Death Proof are joined by spoof commericals for fictitious “products” and “films.” Connections between the two pieces are grounded more in style and visual feel than in plot. The films share a rural Austin, Texas setting (where Death Proof first occurred) and some overlap in characters and details that may take repeated viewings to catch, but the two stories are otherwise independent.
This gave Tarantino and Robert the freedom to approach the movies with their own signature styles. Rodriguez, who put digital filmmaking to the test in Sin City, had much more faith in technology. Cherry’s machine-gun prosthesis, for example, was created with CGI and was added frame-by-frame into the movie. Rodriguez also brought his actors to the monitor and showed them the scene they had just shot, to help them get a feel for what the finished product would look like.
Tarantino, on the other hand, helmed his film with a more old-fashioned approach. He preferred to watch the action without a monitor, often becoming emotionally involved in scenes along with the actors.
Tracie Thoms, who auditioned with Rent co-star Rosario Dawson, always dreamed of doing a horror movie and working with Tarantino. She remembered her experience with the legendary director as laid-back and enjoyable.
“When I work on other films, there’s this person whose job is script supervisor/continuity,” Thoms says. “They make sure you pick up cups with the same hand, and put stuff back in the same place. We didn’t really have that.”
The on-set energy and the two directors’ passion for the genre combined to make Grindhouse a unique experience for audiences. Marley Shelton, one of the few cast members who worked directly with both Tarantino and Rodriguez, says some of her friends walked into Grindhouse with an aversion to violence and horror, yet they came out pleasantly surprised.
“It’s the type of violence that doesn’t cut you to the core,” Shelton says. “It’s gross-out violence – it’s silly and ridiculous and stylized. You’re able to squirm in your seat and laugh and cover your eyes, but not in a way that’s deeply disturbing.”
Medill junior Anton Galang is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
