It's not often that one equates gratuitous violence and sexual content with skillful, calculated filmmaking. Then again, it's not often that something like Grindhouse comes to cinemas, at least not in the past three decades.
In their simulation of the exploitation theater experience of the 1970s, directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino offer moviegoers two back-to-back films, complete with trailers for fake movies. Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof are lovingly crafted and intentionally unpolished, with scratched film stock, missing reels and intermittent hiccups in the sound. It's two adept directors working hard to give us a trashy three-hour joyride.
But trashy doesn't mean bad.
"It was hard to act bad because [Quentin's] writing is so good," says Vanessa Ferlito, who plays Butterfly in Tarantino's segment. Death Proof is a cat-and-mouse game between a stalker in a stunt car and two groups of unsuspecting women. The script provides dialogue at near-Shakespearian quantities, but it also leaves plenty of time for a long car chase.
"As far as Planet Terror, that's a little more close to the whole B-movie, zombie, girls-with-their-breasts-out kind of movie," says Ferlito.
Planet Terror is the more fantastical of the two features. Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez star as lovers leading a pack of small-town Texans against hordes of flesh-eating zombies. She's a Go-Go dancer with a machine gun as a prosthetic leg; he's a sharp-shooting renegade. It's a match made in B-movie heaven.
Both features toss realism out the window and shock viewers with over-the-top action and gory, comedic violence.
"It's a type of violence that doesn't cut you to the core," says Marley Shelton, who plays Dr. Dakota Block. "You're able to squirm in your seat and laugh and cover your eyes."
"Robert is much more a visualist and he is obviously extremely cutting-edge in terms of his technology," says Shelton, who appears in both films.
"The minute we would shoot a scene we would run back to the monitor and he would already be cutting it together . Quentin is very old school. He prefers to shoot on film. He doesn't even have a monitor. Robert's a man of few words and prefers to just show you things, and Quentin likes to talk about it."
Tracie Thomas, who plays Kim, a stunt driver out for revenge in Death Proof, notes the grandiose scope of grindhouse flicks.
"There's almost no such thing as too much or too big in these movies ... I hope the audience will just really see this movie as a thrill ride"
