Planet Terror by Paul Bullock

You all know the story by now, right? Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez's three-hour double-bill homage to the exploitation films of the 1970s is released in America. It bombs at the box-office and gets mixed reviews. To avoid embarrassment and make a bit of money, the Weinstein Company decides to split the two films into separate, extended entities for the international releases. Tarantino's Death Proof is unleashed first. It bombs at the box office and gets mixed reviews. Now it’s the turn of the second film: Rodriquez’s zombie flick Planet Terror. Will this one fare any better?

It‘s unlikely. The plot focuses on Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), a go-go dancer who has a machine gun for a leg and fights the armies of the undead with boyfriend El Wray (Freddy Rodriquez), lesbian nurse Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) and an assortment of fellow weirdoes. And…that‘s it. But then, that‘s the point isn‘t it? Like Death Proof, this is all about clever-clever irony, and that’s apparently enough to forgive the film its non-existent story, vapid acting and lazy direction, not to mention the ever-apparent (but presumably ironic as well) misogyny. Except it’s not. It’s just childish, pointless and incredibly tiresome. It was in the 90s and remains so now.

To his credit, though, Rodriquez seems aware of this and attempts to add some non-ironic flavours into the Planet Terror mix. In Bruce Willis’s cameo as a deranged army sergeant there‘s an Iraq satire. In Cherry‘s relationship with El Wray there‘s a semi-serious love story. And in the second half, when the zombie attacks begin in earnest, there are scenes which have the same kind of thrilling gusto as a big budget action blockbuster. However, when all these elements are thrown together, along with some Evil Dead 2-style maniacal gore and darkly-witty slapstick (a half-anaesthetised Dakota struggling to open a car door is a highlight), the film becomes unbalanced and frankly incomprehensible.

It‘s absolutely bewildering then that amid all this chaos Planet Terror has not been stripped of the grindhouse trimmings from the original double bill. The film opens with a fake trailer for Machete, a disappointingly uninspired riff on big, dumb 80s action films that is now being expanded into a full-length feature by Rodriquez. Once that's over, we're into the film itself which constantly crackles and jumps with those pesky postmodern scratches and even finds time for a reel missing card, which is 'hilariously' placed during a sex scene. Without these 'extras', the film could have been a mainstream (if very chaotic and confused) hit, especially after Shaun of the Dead proved zom-coms are popular again. With them, however, it seems destined to fail once more, the crowd-pleasing stupidity neutered by the high-brow irony of the presentation.

So with the sole hope of commercial success dead, the Grindhouse idea can now be judged as an unmitigated disaster. But who is to blame? The immediate answer is the producers who decided to split the films up. Tarantino and Rodriquez have said that the intention of the project was to experiment with the way cinema is consumed by creating an event movie that would put film back at the centre of a night out, rather than leave it wedged between an early evening meal and late night drink. They were never going to achieve this because cinema simply doesn’t command the same critical or public respect it did in the 70s. But by splitting the two films up, the producers have taken the project’s whole raison d’etre away from it and ended up leaving two vapid, boring and de-contextualised movies that will leave even the directors' fans frustrated.

But ultimately, the producers weren’t the ones who birthed the idea and directed the films; Rodriquez and Tarantino were and the blame must lie with them. Even if you accept the excuses over the split undermining the project’s point, the two films are novelties, intriguing curios that lose their appeal after (and even during) the first viewing. After Sin City and Kill Bill, Planet Terror and Death Proof really underline just where these directors are at in their careers and it doesn‘t make for pretty viewing. Whereas before, they homaged long dead genres while at the same time reinventing them for a new generation (see, in particular, Rodriquez‘s magnificent but overlooked The Faculty), now they simply Xerox them, shoddy direction, terrible acting, lazy writing and all.

They may giggle behind their cameras at the postmodern fun of it all, but ultimately the joke will be on us, the audience. Rodriquez and Tarantino are two of America‘s finest, most inventive filmmakers, who helped redefine independent cinema in the early 90s. If they continue making films like their last two efforts, however, they’ll be lost to tiresome irony and wasteful mediocrity. And that is a prospect far more frightening than anything Planet Terror has to offer.