Grindhouse

“Grindhouse” isn’t meant to be a movie, it’s meant to be an experience.

Envisioned as a tribute to the grimy heyday of grindhouse cinema in the ’60s and ’70s, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double feature B-movie extravaganza screens as two separate flicks: Rodriguez’s zombie spectacular “Planet Terror” and Tarantino’s slasher/souped-up car ride “Death Proof.”

The two are even separated by a series of faux trailers contributed by the directors’ friends and fellow exploitation enthusiasts (“Hostel” director Eli Roth, “Shaun of the Dead” director Edgar Wright, and heavy metalist Rob Zombie among them).

The film stands as an homage to a time when grindhouses served as the unofficial outposts for a select set of disgruntled adolescents ill-served by the Hollywood studio system and looking for an alternative. An alternative which they found in low budget flicks that spanned several genres—kung fu, horror, and car-chase, being just a few—which were played incessantly at the grungiest of local theaters.

The plot of “Planet Terror” involves zombie-producing toxic gas (just go with it) released by renegade military gang led by a gun-totting Bruce Willis, a knife wielding hero and his one-legged Go-Go-Dancing biddy with a machine gun prosthetic (Freddy Rodriguez and Rose McGowan, respectively). Add blood, guts, brains, shooting, and general goopy splattering all around, and the result is, above all, ridiculous.

And that’s exactly what makes it so fantastic, as Rodriguez understands. He mines the genre’s strict rules of convention, form, and plot for all their ludicrous, disjunctive, delightfully absurdist fun. It’s what makes “Planet Terror” a good zombie-movie send up and not a really bad zombie snoozefest.

Tarantino, on the other hand, flips the genre on its head instead of blissfully sending it up, over-reaching with a pretentious brand of meta-cinema that leaves his segment a little less hyperkinetic and a lot more joyless than Rodriguez’s. It mixes a slasher film with car chases, which basically means that the film starts out being one thing but ends up being something else entirely.

The film revolves around a psychotic stuntman (Kurt “Snake Plissken” Russell, in a piece of such inspired casting it rivals John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction” and David Carradine in “Kill Bill”) whose “death-proof” car serves as the primary weapon on his murderous rampage. Until, that is, he gets a taste of his own medicine from a pack of girls (Tracie Thomas, Rosario Dawson, and real-life stunt queen Zoë Bell) with a sweet ride of their own.

As ambitious as it is flawed, “Death Proof” fails to entertain as much as the blood-and-camp festival that is “Planet Terror.” Tarantino’s self-reflexivity is a bit too humorless, his dialogue too talky. What worked with a bunch of gangsters in the opening of “Reservoir Dogs” is just not that captivating with a group of regular girls. I know this game—it’s called let’s-reconstruct-Saturday-night-over-Sunday-brunch, and it’s a lot more fun when I play it with my own friends.

That said, the film does boast an undeniably fantastic car chase climax, on par with the “Vanishing Point,” “Gone in 60 Seconds” (the original one), and “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry” sequences it emulates.

But ultimately the difference between the two segments is the attitude each director takes towards their self-reflexivity. Rodriguez’s film is funnier, cheekier, more willing to recklessly embrace its own cheesiness. You don’t have to be a zombie savant to appreciate his joke. But Tarantino’s flick all but demands a genre aficionado to fully appreciate the references.

“Grindhouse” is a testament to nostalgic perversion, a kind of tribute to rebellious baby-boomer arrested development. It nails every ridiculous convention and casual consequence of low budget production, from missing reels to badly scratched prints. But more than just being a very good reproduction, “Grindhouse” inadvertently taps into the universal appeal of blood, shock, sex, and fast cars that’s alive as much today as it was 30 years ago.