After all the fun we had in our discussion about Death Proof, I broke down and watched Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. If I was tepid on Tarantino’s films before Death Proof, my feelings towards Rodriguez’s work was bordering on hostile. Once again, however, I found myself enjoying the other Grindhouse movie immensely. I personally favor Death Proof because the narrative is so much crazier in many ways and the feel is much rawer and less produced. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Planet Terror, and particularly for scenes like the one below:
Riffing on the clip, Planet Terror (unlike Death Proof) is very much a filmed video game in terms of action, narrative time, and violence. More than that, Rodriguez was not only quoting other horror/alien zombie films he was mashing them up. During the scenes in the hospital I couldn’t help thinking about how he was crossing Dawn of the Dead with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (my favorite Halloween by the way). In fact, these films are moving further away from referencing other films, and closer to actually mashing the originals up. Isn’t that the logical next step?
cheers!
I’m with you on this. And while Tarantino and Rodriguez are over-th-top as you suggest, they have a real affection for those films that very few other filmmakers do in our moment. With all the bad films coming out now, I would imagine some of them would capitalize on the tradition of bad movies, but they act like they are making their bad movies in a vacuum, the worst kind of bad movie in my opinion.