Movie Review: Grindhouse

I had my first experience with this style of cinema when I was a young lad, living in California at the time. (yeah I lived in Cali on an Army base no less.) There was a drive-in theater I went to with my mom and I was subjected to two movies called I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House to The Left. Funny enough, I didn't actually see them until the late 80s. I saw the marquee for them on my way to see the original Day of the Dead with my mom, which was fine by me, but I was intriqued by the titles alone. So when I found them finally in a video store I frequnted, the guy told me to watch them "back to back" like the old days. And I did. Ideally, these films should not have been made just for the sheer audacity of the subject matter themselves. To sum them up in one word, I would say "sickening"

These types of movies haven't been made in a very, long time, but some of them are made more stylistic-horror, like for example, Eli Roth's HOSTEL recently. Grindhouse films are gritty, nasty and utterly dispicable, but you can either love them or hate them. They're apart of the cinema canon as anything else these days. Which brings me to the movie I saw over the last weekend, which is also called Grindhouse. It's an nod to the days of the early 70s when movies like this were shown in double-feature style. So when there's a grindhouse feature called Planet Terror and Death Proof, with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez associated with it - I had to check it out.

If you're not old enough to remember grindhouse movies, Wikipedia has a lovely definition for it and highlights and expands on it perfectly.Given that it runs three hours and 11 minutes and comprises two feature-length movies along with an assortment of bogus trailers, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse might be called a cinematic Double Whopper with Cheese, oozing grease, ketchup and a dare to find a better bargain anywhere at the multiplex.

Grindhouse doesn't aim simply to re-create two 30-year-old movie types. It's also out to conjure a whole bygone movie-going experience: what it was like to see a genre double-bill in a seedy second-run theater in the 1970s. Artistically, Grindhouse turns out to be in its own deliberately way to be plain ole trashy. Teaming up for a double-feature tribute to '70s-style grade-B cult movies, Rodriguez serves up a zombie shocker á la Night of the Living Dead, which Tarantino follows with an offbeat car chase thriller in the mold, roughly, of Vanishing Point (which was even a plot device to move the story along and had alot to do with the last half of the movie). These are in no way spoofs, parodies or quasi-remakes. They are a double-barreled work of pop art whose success, paradoxically enough, results from filmmakers apparently operating in tandem perfectly.

This movie takes you back in the day. Tarantino previously tested many old school elements in the Kill Bill movies, so when he went all out with this one, it all felt right and familiar. So when you saw the vintage "Coming Attractions" and "Our Feature Presentation" light-show animations were insanely on point and authentic. Even down to the fake previews is part of this experience. So is the blizzard of technical deficiencies, i.e. scratches, blurs, jump cuts, audio pops, "missing reel" announcements—that's wittily and artificially applied throughout Grindhouse. I was in awe at just how the movies were excuted not even from the subject matter. I enjoyed every single, solitary crazy minute of this movie. I even felt that Fergie's scene was better than the whole Mariah Carey movie Glitter. It was that good. That should show you how much I loved this movie.

It's very, nostalgic. Like I said before, if you're old enough to remember the era of Night of the Living Dead/Vanishing Point, then you'll have a great time, but then you'll have those too young to recall it. As a member of the first group, I'll go ahead and say that I am a huge fan of the genre of films Rodriguez and Tarantino pay tribute to here, but if you're not, you're still unavoidably susceptible to the memory buttons they're pushing. But what about younger viewers? How can you be nostalgic for something you never experienced? Perhaps the easiest answers are that any viewer can be entranced by Tarantino's and Rodriguez's feel for these old movies, and that such films have long since passed into the collective memory anyway; even if you've never seen the original Gone in 60 Seconds or Day of the Dead, ya kinda have.

In effect, Grindhouse reminds us of what we've lost and it does so at the most basic of levels. It gives us the blotches, splices and glitches. It overheats and goes over the top. It transports us back to the tawdry, low-grade thrills once widely available in cinema's disreputable bargain basement. If I have to say anymore, then I'll say this - GO SEE THIS FUCKIN' MOVIE!!!!