"Grindhouse" review, the split view: "Planet Terror"
By Sarah Carlson
April 9, 2007
“Planet Terror” begins, after deliberate technical difficulties and a fake trailer for a film called “Machete,” with a long look at Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), a go-go dancer disillusioned with her profession and nursing old heartaches. Director Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City,” “Desperado”) does his best to show us every one of Cherry’s curves -- and every one of her tears -- which sets the tone for the entire experience that is “Grindhouse”: a pulpy, bloody, silly ode to exploitation films brought to you by likely two of the genre’s biggest fans, Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who each share an obsession with their heroines. Tarantino's more serious, character-driven "Death Proof" might be the better of the two films, but "Planet Terror" is simply more fun.
Cherry walks out on her go-go dancing gig in a small Texas town, heads to a local barbecue joint to mope and contemplates her dream career in stand-up comedy. Here she runs into Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), a junkyard owner with a dark past, whom she walked out on not too long ago. He agrees to give her a ride home, but their trip is cut short thanks to a chemical weapons trade gone awry.
Dangerous chemicals were released at a military base two miles up the road, and once you come in contact with them and don’t have the proper anecdote, your skin will start to bubble, you’ll break out in sores and you’ll have the strange desire to rip apart other humans and eat their flesh. Drag. Wray’s tow truck is overturned and Cherry’s pulled out by the zombie-like victims of the chemicals, but Wray saves her just as they’ve pulled off her leg. Wray is taken into custody by the sheriff (Michael Biehn) and Cherry heads to the hospital, which is quickly being overrun by patients with bubbling skin.
Anesthesiologist Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) had been planning a rendezvous with her secret lover, but the zombie patients and her menacing husband, Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) get in her way. She’s got to escape and get herself and her son to safety, while on the other side of town, Wray is trying to get out of custody and get back to Cherry. The zombies are multiplying, and it’s up to the remaining townsfolk who’ve avoided contact with the chemical to band together and find a way to escape, picking off any zombies that get in their way.
“Planet Terror” doesn’t hold back from showing you body parts being ripped off, heads exploding, faces melting, etc., but it’s all so over-the-top in true exploitation film fashion, you’ll laugh more than you cringe. Rodriguez took the premise of a zombie movie and ran with it, adding as much blood, bad acting, spliced film reels and cleavage shots as possible while not exceeding an R rating. At this year’s South by Southwest film festival, he gave an eager audience a preview of his work and a tutorial in Grindhouse 101, explaining that to him, grind-house cinema means freedom. It’s the freedom for actors to ham it up on screen, the freedom to not explain plot developments and blame it on missing reels that weren’t even filmed, and the freedom for him to employ all the tricks he admired when he watched exploitation films as a kid.
His contribution to “Grindhouse” is the weaker of the two because while “Death Proof” can stand on its own, “Planet Terror” is better served in the context of “Grindhouse,” or an awareness of grind-house films, when the audience is in on the joke. Parts of “Terror” are technically bad, but it’s just so much fun to watch. The two films complement each other, with characters overlapping and each director taking a very different approach to the concept of replicating grind-house cinema.
The biggest common homage comes in the form of the directors’ leading ladies: Laced throughout “Grindhouse” is a love not just for the femme fatale, but for anything/one female. “Grindhouse’s” heroines are beautiful, articulate, but above all deadly, whether it’s their looks doing the killing or the machine gun that’s attached to their leg. The men do what they can to save the day, but the women come out ahead.
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