Other movies in this series:
Planet Terror

The tyranist's thoughts
This was the second half of Grindhouse and since it was directed by Quentin Tarantino, was also the one I was less excited about. Sometimes I really like what Tarantino does, but most of the time, I find his movies to be a bit tedious and overly talkative. Still, I had some hope that this one would be different just because it was part of Grindhouse.
Stuntman Mike spends his time driving the southland looking for young girls to kill. No reason. Just because he can. To accomplish his ends, he uses his death-proofed car. I'd tell you what kind it is, but I'm functionally car-blind. I can barely find my own car in the parking lot after the movie.
This really ends up being two movies about two different groups of girls that encounter Stuntman Mike. Both segments start out with nothing but dialogue that seems endless and trite and boring. Eventually they break into a bit of action that makes it all worth it though. The first segment felt both longer and more boring than the second. If it weren't for Rose McGowan and Jordan Ladd, there wouldn't have been a single sympathetic character. I couldn't even warm to Stuntman Mike.
In the second half though, the characters were still far too talky, but more interesting and much more sympathetic somehow. I liked all of the girls and felt it easy to root for them. There are even a couple moments when Stuntman Mike seems human and needs to be pitied.
Oh, and there was a bizarre, almost inexplicable bridge between the two segments. Between that and the complete disappearance of one of the characters half way through the second segment, there are a lot of unanswered questions left at the end of the movie.
This was definitely inferior to its sibling, Planet Terror, but didn't degrade the whole Grindhouse experience enough to put me off of it completely. Tarantino made a movie that was pretty typical of him and I enjoyed enough of it to throw it onto the small pile of Tarantino work I like.
But I do have to insist you see this in the theatre with a good crowd. It's going to completely lose an audience that has the option of running out to check the email or hit the head. Toward the beginning of this one it was practically daylight in the theatre as a hundred cellphones came out and the texting of the bored commenced. Luckily the movie gets better as it goes along and by the end everyone was into it.
Posted: April 10, 2007

Rish Outfield's reviews
Of the two of us here at the HFC, I'm the Tarantino fan and tyranist is the . . . well, I daren't say the Quentin Tarantino hater, exactly (though that's closer to the truth than some words, but he's not a big fan. Q.T. is a director--perhaps THE director--who is polarizing to audiences. Either you love his work or you hate it; sitting on the fence is not allowed.
So how is it that I ended up liking Death Proof even less than tyranist did?
We saw Grindhouse together, the night it came out, and the theatre was packed. By the midway point, when the fake trailers were playing, we were dealt a wheelbarrow of outrageous delight. There was laughter, there was wincing, there was momentum built up. Then Death Proof began, and it all came to an end.
I've heard a lot of people complain that Tarantino's films are over-long, rambling, pointless, overly brutal and violent, profane, mean-spirited, filled with puzzling and dated semi-pop culture references, needlessly nonlinear, and overstuffed with inane, completely irrelevant dialogue.
And except for the non-linear storytelling point, that's exactly what I thought of Death Proof. Except that it was also boring and no fun.
It was really hard to like the first group of introduced characters. I also noticed, as other reviews did, that every character sounded EXACTLY like Quentin Tarantino. Hence, they all sounded like each other. And that's irritating, when, if you're like me, you go to a movie trying to find someone to connect with, and somebody(s) to root for.
Should we have liked Stuntman Mike, our psychotic speed demon, rooted for him to kill and kill again? If not, then why were his (potential) victims painted as such hateful, unpleasant, soulless, self-absorbed, and worthless human beings? Hell, of the whole cast, one girl was sympathetic only to be abandoned by the story, and another was simply because she was played by Rosario Dawson. And Kurt Russell can outcharm a trainful of doped-up, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, twenty-somethings.
The dialogue scenes (all four of them) just went on and on. I've got to wonder what the point was--if this was supposed to entertain, if it was supposed to develop character, if it was supposed to be charming . . . or if it was just Q.T. tickling himself with lots of snappy talk and attitude, or if there was only half and hour of story and a full movie had to be made of it. I saw no less than four people turn on their cellphones and start text messaging during Death Proof. Normally, I'd be infuriated, but I wonder what I would do had I anyone on the face of the earth to send a text message to.
There are a couple of nice moments, don't get me wrong, and the car chase and stuntwork was pretty interesting (as was the uber-gory multi-character death scene midway through the film), but the rest of the movie was torture on the level of what the characters go through in Hostel. When the movie was over, I felt like getting into a scalding shower and scrubbing an entire bar of soap away in an attempt to feel clean again.
And you know, maybe that was the point. I'm mid-way through chronicling my memories of going to the American Grindhouse double-features at the New Beverly Cinemas in Los Angeles, and one element that keeps coming back to me is how sleazy that place (and the people who went there) could be. I've heard stories of the real grindhouses of the Seventies, particularly those in New York's Times Square, and apparently all sorts of depravity went on there, and you were lucky to go home with your person, pants, or wallet unmolested. So maybe that's what Tarantino was going for here.
All I know is, that during Robert Rodriquez's Planet Terror, I was having a grand old time and during this one . . . well, I wasn't.
Note: Tyranist and I debated for a while about how to review these two films, which you could technically call one film, if you wanted to. In the end, we felt we would better serve the two features if we treated them as two separate movies on a double bill, and give them separate Skulls and entries. That way, if somewhere down the line, they make a second Grindhouse (which seems unlikely given the poor box office over the weekend), we could have a page like our "Masters of Horror" and "HorrorFest" pages, with links to all the reviewed films in that series.
Best Scare: Stuntman Mike seemed a little scary at the beginning, but once he opened his mouth, it became clear he was the most likable person in the room.
I'd Recommend It To: Well, here's the thing: though I hated this section of the film, the experience of seeing Planet Terror and the fake trailers was so great that I have to recommend the movie to anybody who likes exploitation cinema. I'm not so sure how the movie(s) will translate to video and television release, but my guess is, a lot of people who wait for the DVD will say to themselves, "Man, this would've been great to see in the theatre."
Posted: April 10, 2007

Total Skulls: 13

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?