In 2007 Quentin Tarantino teamed up with Robert Rodriguez with the intention of wanting to take audiences back to the days of low-brow, low budget and all round low-quality exploitation cinema. So with this in mind the pair served up Grindhouse, a double feature of lovingly crafted schlock designed to make you feel like you have been transported back to the seventies and have found yourself seated in a seedy back room movie theatre.
From Rodriguez’s end he offers up Planet Terror, a good old-fashioned cheesy zombie flick that plunges a small town into a chaos as a strange chemical is released into the air leaving stripper Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) to lead a group of unlikely heroes as they try to survive the hordes of infected. From Tarantino’s camp we get Death Proof, a send up to the slasher genre that follows Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) as he stalks and attempts to murder two groups of friends with his ‘death-proof’ stunt car.
Both halves are great send-ups to their selective genres and are gorgeously stylised with techniques such as grainy prints and missing reels employed to make you really feel like you are watching something that has been popped out of a rusty film can from the dirty store-room of some back street cinema. A fantastic tribute to some days of cinema that are long dead and thoroughly enjoyable one at that.
Grindhouse (2007), directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, is released on Blu-Ray and DVD in the UK by Momentum Pictures Home Entertainment.
