Ground Up

Hyped literally to death, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 1970s-style exploitation double bill Grindhouse flopped so disastrously in the United States that its release in Australia was delayed for almost a year. But now, finally, for just a few days more at the Astor, we're getting the whole enchilada: 193 minutes of blood, sex and all-round mayhem, complete with hokey censorship warnings and funny trailers for imaginary films from a range of guest directors.

On paper, Rodriguez's Texan horror-sci-fi hybrid Planet Terror might look like a full meal all by itself, with zombies, go-go-dancers, crazy babysitters, and a last-minute plot twist involving the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. But in practice the multiple hooks don't hook together: the film achieves but does not transcend the status of a disjointed B-movie best watched late at night in a venue where attention can freely wander.

Tarantino's infinitely superior, full-to-bursting Death Proof is many things: a slasher movie on wheels, a love letter to stuntmen and stuntwomen, an examination of the sado-masochistic drives underlying narrative. Every last detail is openly fetishised, above all when it comes to the actresses: Vanessa Ferlito's wiggling buttocks, Zoe Bell's New Zealand accent, Rose McGowan's smart mouth and platinum blonde hair.

Less sympathetic viewers may fail to realise that the point of it all isn't camp excess so much as a desire to return cinema to its origins, which means the 1970s only because this is roughly when these filmmakers happened to grow up. Indeed, Grindhouse in its entirety could be seen
as a treatise on the medium's two basic, opposed impulses: towards fantasy, and towards documentary.

Thus Planet Terror is built around a digitally-manufactured image - a woman with a machine gun in place of her right leg - which would have been inconceivable in the heyday of big-screen exploitation. By contrast, spectacle in Death Proof consists primarily of stunts performed in front of the camera by performers genuinely risking life and limb.

It remains slightly anomalous for Tarantino and Rodriguez should be campaigning to bring down-and-dirty thrills back to the movie theatre, given that cheaply-made action-horror is hardly extinct (the distance between Planet Terror and, say, the Resident Evil franchise is not that great). There is, moreover, a level of failure built into the whole project of recreating an ideally unselfconscious movie-going experience in the fussiest way imaginable, lovingly simulating every last scratch on a supposedly beat-up print.

The genius of Death Proof is that Tarantino grasps this perversity and runs with it all the way to the end. Rodriguez, for his part, seems blithely unaware of the problem. But maybe that's the reason the association between these two has lasted - because Tarantino knows, in
his heart, that his friend is the pure naive artist he could never be.

Grindhouse (MA) screens nightly at the Astor Theatre, Melbourne, till March 30.