planet terror

Grindhouse was a project undertaken by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez a few years back now.

The idea was for them to both produce a film that harked back to the b-movies that they'd "grown up on". These would then be shown as a double feature, back-to-back, with a few additional bits and pieces chucked in, like fake trailers. QT's offering was called Death Prof, and Rodriguez's feature was Planet Terror.

Broadly speaking it didn't work and flopped a bit at the box office. What they hadn't really factored in was that people aren't really keen on double features any more. Even though cinema ticket prices are quite expensive nowadays, the extra value offered by a double feature didn't really appeal to people.

Certainly I personally can remember thinking that over 3 hours of cinema sitting wasn't much fun for my bum during the LotR features and don't think I'd have much fancied it for the Grindhouse double feature )this was only done in the states - everywhere else got them separate).

So they've also split them up for DVD and extend them a bit. There's still a super-deluxe original-format Grindhouse version I believe, but for the purposes of recouping costs, separating the DVDs makes sense.

I've not seen death proof yet - they're both on my rental lists, and it seems planet terror has popped out first.

Tbh, I don't really mind too much, as of the two I prefer Rodriguez. If I'm honest I'm not quite as enamoured of QT as most film buffs - not that I think his stuff is bad, I just don't orgasm over it in the same way.

Anyway, the point is to talk about Planet Terror.

Overall, my verdict is that it's okay.

Basically, it's roughly a zombie-apocalypse film, although this is actually one of its problems - it's not quite a zombie apocalypse film and I think it would have been a bit better if it had definitely been that.

What it does to very well is capture the cheesiness of such B-movie fair. The problem with this is it means this film is also cheesy. Admittedly it's cheesy with a few knowing winks, but still cheesy.

Also I think a few more direct references to classic B-movies would have helped. There are a few, but not as many as I'd hoped. Instead, as the (interesting) Rodriguez commentary track explains it's more of a homage in general sense.

So we get Carpenter-esque theme tunes or scenes similar in style to his stuff, but not actually directly referencing his films. This works but only so much. Also it becomes apparent that Rodriguez is definitely a Carpenter fanboy.

This is great in that I'm also a bit of a Carpenter fanboy, but the problem is that it needed a bit more of a wider fanbase. Some more influences would have helped, as it it's like why not just watch a Carpenter film instead?

The only other thing that I found odd was that the films were on one level a homage to B-movies of the seventies and eighties and yet they featured a lot of very modern stuff. It's like, the cars were old and the way people dressed was somewhat of the period, yet people had what looked like blackberrys.

Similarly, the films were processed and all scratched up as if they were proper, abused double feature prints (there was even a 'missing reel') from long ago, and yet the plot refers to Osama Bin Laden - a very modern thing.

It made it a little confusing.

Anyway, overall I liked the film, but perhaps not as much as I'd hoped.