When the creators of Sin City (Robert Rodriguez) and Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino) come together, I have to pay attention. The two of them love movies, love movies the way I love movies, in all of their cheesy glory. Often they end up doing pastiches of the type of movie they grew up watching and loving, while adding their particular spin to them. Thus they bring us Grindhouse, something to quench your thirst for exploitation films (though, admittedly, how much of a thirst could there be out there?).



Grindhouse attempts to recreate the movie-going experience of the grindhouses, those inner-city theaters with strange combinations of grade z movies shown marathon-style. The movies themselves were filled with cheap thrills, casual violence, and pure escape in an anything-goes brand of story-telling. These days, we have direct-to-DVD productions, so we don’t have that cinematic experience much anymore. The junk cinema features an old school aesthetic which Grindhouse re-creates with soundtrack static, flickers on screen, and missing reels.

Planet Terror

Robert Rodriguez fulfills the promise of From Dusk til Dawn. A great caper movie that turns into a vampire flick, that movie worked better in concept than it did in execution. But Planet Terror brims with energy and style over substance (and has a holster fixation: everyone kept shoving things in pockets or drawing them out with a flourish). Rodriguez uses the affectations of the movie to his advantage—for instance, using the missing reel to escape the many corners he had written himself into. The characters even refer back to events in the missing reel.

The plot, such that it is, revolves around an infection that turns people to zombie-like creatures, reducing them to something less than human. The over-the-top script covers outrageous characterizations with action that defies all known laws of physics. Cars blow up in more ridiculous ways than (cinema) usual, plus the dismemberment gore gushes blood like erupting red Jell-O. With action for action’s sake, making not a lick of sense, you basically just have to sit back and enjoy the ride.

“Who are you really?” —Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn)

Like the nature of sin itself, the “zombie-fying” infection spreads among the people, soldiers and civilians alike. Because of the introduction of sin, the created order is disrupted, leaving humanity (once infected with sin) not as it was meant to be. While not specifically using zombies, Planet Terror does make use of the imagery (eating and shredding raw flesh). These creatures illustrate a resurrection to walking death, living death, with no hope—only the eternal existence in a “body of death” (Romans 7:24). They are particular reminders that there are worse things than death.

“I need you to become who you were meant to be.” —El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez)

Enter El Wray as a kind of Christ figure: No one understands his real identity; he is with the survivors for a while; he invests himself in a few, such as Cherry Darling, the stripper—sorry, go-go dancer—who loses a leg and has it replaced with a machine gun; he transforms their way of living; and he gives them a mission and destination, a new earth. “I find the lost, the weary, those that have no hope, and I lead them,” he says to Cherry.

“Don’t you get it? We’re the antidote.” —Abby (Naveen Andrews, Lost)

This called-out group has to stand against the infection and its consequences. “At some point in life you find a use for all of your useless talents,” Dr. Dakota Block remarks. Those seemingly useless talents are put to use in their battles. This ekklesia seeks a sense of community and meaning in life, choosing to use their gifts to impact their world by becoming an alternative society to the ways of this world, a saving presence working toward redemption.

A superb cast, obviously in on the joke, makes Planet Terror a modern thriller that somehow feels equally at home in the ’70s. The movie is low-grade entertainment that achieves a greater sense of fun than the movies it copies.

Death Proof

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