To be honest, the movie that I was excited to see was "Planet Terror," which was Robert Rodriguez's ode to the cheesy but very serious gore/sci-fi movies of the seventies.
I really liked it, too. It was funny at times, serious (and gory) at times, and a just a fun, enjoyable, experience. At one point in the movie, the hero (El Rey) and the heroine (Cherry) are doing the obligatory 'sex' thing, and they're getting pretty hot and heavy, and all of the sudden- there's a frame from the management apologizing for the missing reel.
Then it gets back to the movie, and the building all the survivors were at is in flames, and the sherrif who was giving Rey such a hard time shakes his hand, and says "Thanks for explaining- I'm sorry I was giving you such a hard time" and it's like you were dropped into the movie like twenty minutes later. It was awesome.
Even though the movie is obviously modern (it references Osama Bin Laden, and several characters use cell phones and sidekicks), the scratches make it feel like you're actually watching a seventies movie, without all the restoration techniques that make you realize you're just watching a poorly acted, badly written B movie.
On thing that my Dad told me (also a movie afficianado) was that for old B movies, the greatest expense was flying the actors to mexico, the phillipines, italy, or wherever, so they would use the same actors over and over for different films, use the same sets and areas, just to cut costs.
So watching the second movie, it was kind of fun to have the same actors show up in cameos.
Before the first movie, and between the first movie and the second, there are fake film trailers, made by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and some other friends. The trailers are fake, but they're funny- Rodriguez makes a trailer for "Machete," the story of a mexican day laborer who is accidently hired by a white congressman to assassinate his opponent.
It was funny and campy in a seventies kind of way, and it put me in the mood to watch the first movie.
The second set of trailers, between the two movies, was a little... different.
Rob Zombie made the trailer "Werewofl Women of the SS," which was campy and kind of fun, but was pretty repetitive. Nick Cage shows up at the end as asian villian "Fumanchu!" which was funny enough to make me laugh, but that was about all.
The following trailer, "Don't" was... weird. It just showed people getting killed for wandering around this haunted house, and said "If you think it's safe to go in the basement... DON'T!" (and variations on that theme) over and over.
The last trailer, "Thanksgiving" was just disturbing. At the beginning of the trailer, a serial killer dresses up like an evil pilgrim, in all black, and starts killing people. In fact, he shows up at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and cuts the head off the guy dressed as a turkey. That made me laugh a little bit, because the guy in the turkey suit ran around for a little bit before falling down. And then the trailer went on for like ten minutes, with just gore. People getting thier heads cut off, women getting stolen, over and over. The trailer was just disturbing.
and THEN we head into Tarantino's movie "Deathproof," which refers to the fact that professional stuntmen can take a car that needs to be crashed for a movie stunt, and weld bars and cages into it to make it as safe as possible to crash, so that no one will die doing the stunt. Stuntman Mike, the quasi-main character, does this to his car, so he can crash into cars full of women and kill them. No explanation is given of his motivations or issues, although they are pretty clearly there.
The major problem I had with this movie, aside from the fact that Tarantino wrote it, was that Tarantino wrote it. Remember the diner scene from Resevoir Dogs, or all that extraneous talking in Pulp Fiction? That much and more is all over this movie- in fact, rather than having people talking, Tarantino decides to change things up and have women talk in this movie. So for the first fourty-five minutes of the movie, there is little more than dialogue between women. First, three women talking about weed. (Seriously) And then, just to change it up, the same women talk about men, sex, and weed. They die (thankfully), and then we move onto another group of women.
Strangely enough, both groups of women have the same racial makeup- one is black, one is white-bread white, and one is 'middle of the aisle' with dark hair and eyes. The fourth woman in both groups is the same woman- Zoe, although she plays two different roles.
Now that the first group is dead, the second group needs thier intro discussion, so we're subjected to another half hour of talking, followed by an arguably bad-ass car chase. But was the car chase worth the first hour and change of talking, without anything really happening? No. No, no it was not.
There's the car chase, which is cool, and then the girls beat up Stuntman Mike. The end.
My rating?
Planet Terror: 5/5
Deathproof: 1/5
-kv
