Military Movies - Military Times

Troubled double

Want the story? I’ll spin it for you quick.

Back in the mists of prehistory — before the invention of home videocassette players — low-rent, rundown movie theaters known as “grindhouses” offered a certain type of movie fan a steady diet of “exploitation” films, a broad genre that included splatter flicks, bad-girls-in-prison flicks, cannibal flicks, biker flicks, Nazi flicks, kung fu flicks and softcore porn flicks, among others.

During their 1970s heyday, such theaters, which often ran these films 24/7 (hence, “grinding them out”), could be found in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other big U.S. cities.

(Times Square had several before home video sounded their death knell and Disney and Rudy Giuliani finished the job by wiping the Square clean of all ambience except the ambience of corporate consumerism. Not that I’m bitter or anything,)

Filmmaking buddies Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez unabashedly admit that these seedy venues were where they fell in love with movies and honed the decidedly off-kilter cinema sensibilities that have made them rich. Now they seek to spread the love with “Grindhouse,” a double feature on which the boys share writing duties and split directing duties.

Most people know immediately if they’re in the target zone for this off-the-wall nutfest of slutty girls, bursting heads, fiery explosions, bloodthirsty zombies and killer cars. But just in case, here’s an easy self-test:

“Planet Terror,” the Rodriguez zombie flick that plays first on the twin bill, features a sexy go-go dancer (Rose McGowan) who has one leg amputated just below the knee, thus ruining her dream of becoming a stand-up comedian, but is fitted by her boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez, no relation to Robert) with a fully functional prosthetic M-16 automatic rifle with grenade launcher, which she uses to create major havoc.

Did that make you smile? Then this is your movie.

“Planet Terror” is about a military bioweapons experiment that goes ridiculously awry and creates ravenous zombies covered in gooey blood pustules that burst at all-too-frequent intervals.

Along with McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez, it features Bruce Willis in commando mode and Naveen Andrews of TV’s “Lost” as a mad scientist, along with some other recognizable faces — Michael Biehn as a sheriff, Jeff Fahey as the proprietor of a backwoods rib joint called “The “Bone Shack,” Josh Brolin as a brooding doctor and the so-hot-she’s-almost-illegal Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson of Black Eyed Peas fame. (“Now that’s a rump roast!” one character blurts.)

“Death Proof,” directed by Tarantino, pays tribute to a much different but no less storied genre, the muscle-car highway mayhem flick. (Just in case you don’t catch the vibe, he has characters in two different scenes spell it out — “Vanishing Point,” “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,” “White Lightning.”)

“Death Proof” stars a 1971 Chevy Nova SS, a 1970 Dodge Charger, a 1970 Dodge Challenger and Kurt Russell as a former movie stuntman who gets his jollies using his safety-enhanced stunt cars to murder young women, but who meets his match in a trio of tough, sexy pals played by Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms and Zoe Bell.

With no deep meaning or redeeming social value whatsoever, it’s all silly, stupid fun — for a while. But a little of this kind of thing goes a long, long way, and at three hours, “Grindhouse” ends up seriously overstaying its welcome.

Both features have lengthy stretches in which Tarantino and Rodriguez seem to lose sight of the fact that many of the old exploitation flicks are just flat-out awful. To go more than about an hour on either feature, “Grindhouse” needs to parody that awfulness, not just replicate it. Too often, it doesn’t.

The dialogue is particularly hit-and-miss. There are some rough gems (“I seen a stripper with one breast, and I seen a stripper with 12 toes, but I ain’t never seen a stripper with one leg — and I been to Morocco!”)

But too often, the dialogue stays stuck in the banal vein of this “Death Proof” exchange:

“Who is that guy?”

“That’s Stuntman Mike.”

“Who the heck is Stuntman Mike?”

“He’s a stuntman.”

Surprisingly, Tarantino fares worse on that score. Where the bursting pustules, exploding heads and severed limbs of “Planet Terror” simply grow repetitive after a while, “Death Proof” commits an even bigger sin by staging two long sequences in which women sit around a table yak-yak-yakking about nothing of consequence.

The second of these sequences lasts a solid 20 minutes; I could swear some people at my packed screening were snoring by the time it finally ended. It goes on so long that you start to wonder if Tarantino isn’t pulling some kind of goofy joke. If so, he never shows his cards.

Tarantino’s trademark self-indulgences, which once seemed cute and clever, are also growing tiresome, such as his penchant for giving himself on-screen parts in all his films.

He makes more of a nuisance of himself in “Planet Terror” than in “Death Proof,” although to be fair, his turn in the former involves him in one of the most jaw-dropping gross-out effects of any movie since the end of the actual grindhouse era — a bit that I can’t even begin to describe in a family-friendly venue like this.

You’ve been warned.

In the same vein, Tarantino’s obsession with stuffing numerous insider references into his films is also getting annoying. Honestly, trying to keep up with his self-reverential pop-culture hipster shtick is becoming exhausting.

Freddy Rodriguez’s character in “Planet Terror” for example, is known as “El Wray.” How many viewers will recognize this as a tribute to the late Link Wray, the guitarist who invented the fuzz box and power chord?

Topping the list of such touches, however, is Tarantino’s billing of Zoe Bell, one of the hellcats in “Death Proof”: “Zoe Bell … as herself.” In other words, if you don’t already know who Zoe Bell is, you’re, like, so lame, man.

(For the record: she’s a New Zealand-born stuntwoman who doubled for Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” movies and for Lucy Lawless in the “Xena: Warrior Princess” TV series.)

In a curious twist, “Grindhouse” scores its biggest and best laughs not so much in its two features themselves, but in the lovingly recreated accoutrements of the cheap grindhouse aesthetic — starting with the deliberate insertion of digital scratches, pops and skips to emulate the often terrible quality of the prints shown in the old theaters.

Similarly, both “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof” sport one sex scene apiece — but each time, just as the action heats up, the film “breaks” and a message flashes: “Missing Reel … We Regret the Inconvenience — The Management.” Another all-too-real grindhouse touch.

Also featured are pitch-perfect “coming attractions,” trailers for other faux exploitation movies that are far funnier than anything in either “Planet Terror” or “Death Proof.”

Included are a Nazi-sploitation film, “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” (with a surreal cameo by a very famous A-list star), and two splatter flicks, “Thanksgiving,” about a psycho in a Pilgrim outfit terrorizing a family holiday gathering (“White meat, dark meat — all will be carved!”); and “Don’t.” (“If you’re thinking of going into the basement … don’t!” “If you’re thinking of opening that closet door … don’t!”)

If only “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof” consistently rose to that level of campiness. Both have outrageously sicko, soda-spewing moments. But they also leave a slight aftertaste of talented filmmakers who are starting to believe — mistakenly — that they’re a bigger attraction than the films they make.

And that makes large chunks of the uneven “Grindhouse” simply a grind.