Grindhouse

Trailers are up for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s latest project, Grindhouse, a double feature that includes Rodriquez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof. The film will be released on April 6 and, I have to say, I am very excited. Both auteurs are clearly working in the style and genre for which they are so well known, with Rodriguez directing a clan of murderous zombies and a machine gun-legged Rose McGowan and Tarantino directing a violence-filled slasher saturated with his edgy style.

I love just how much they have camped up these two films. In doing so, they have taken the excessive amount of violence featured in both and made it equal parts funny, violent, and gruesome. This is different, and in my opinion far more enjoyable, than the countless horror pictures out there that employ violence and gore too seriously, without at least a little self-consciousness of the over-the-top silliness of it all. For example, Rose McGowan, as I noted, sports a machine gun for a prosthetic leg, brandishing it to save herself from a band of zombies. I mean, come on, this is funny stuff people. Or how about the mother that tells her son, “If anyone comes to the door, I want you to run.” “What if it’s Dad,” asks the son, followed by a shot of biochemically sick Daddy. “Especially if it’s your Dad.”

Okay, maybe that last part doesn’t translate well to words, but you have to check out these trailers for yourself. The film is named Grindhouse after theaters that used to play back-to-back films exploiting sex, violence, and other extreme subject matter. FirstShowing.net elaborates:

A grind house is a small theater with usually one screen, popular “underground” a few years back, that would show films that were so “indie” that the reels would be carried around to each theater (no extra prints were made). This means they’d get dirtier over time and sometimes reels would be missing or messed up.

Despite being produced in Hollywood by major studios, it looks like this double feature from Rodriguez and Tarantino will preserve (or at least mimic, as in the intentional film deformation) a good deal of the experience provided by the original grind houses.