Director: Robert Rodriguez
Cast: Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn
Have I Seen it Before: Now that is an interesting question. I missed the original Grindhouse double feature when it originally hit theaters. In the ensuing years, I definitely know I’ve watched Tarantino’s half of the project, Death Proof (2007), but as I watched the film unfurl this time, there were parts of it that struck vague memories, but other parts which I had both completely forgotten, and would have assumed I had remembered. So I can only offer a 75% certainty about any answer to that question.
Did I Like It: Not being all that certain that I’ve seen it before is probably a pretty thorough—if soft—indictment of the movie, but I also say that I had about as much fun as I possibly could at this point with what I was seeing.
I can’t watch the film without thinking that Dimension picked the wrong guy to direct the nearly concurrent remake of Halloween (2007). Here, Rodriguez has tapped in such subtle ways into the energy on display in Halloween II (1981), that I would have far preferred to see what he had to offer on Michael Myers. At first I thought I was imagining things, but when William (Josh Brolin) reaches to stab his wife, Dakota (Shelton) in the eye with a syringe, I became unassailably convinced that Rodriguez knew exactly from whom he was borrowing.
I was far more interested in those touches than I was in the larger subject matter, though. I’ve long since been fed up with the zombie genre on spec, that I could see past the inherent nihilism of the genre for any stretch of time is surely to Rodriguez’s credit. That I was able to have any amount of fun with the film when the imprimatur of the Weinsteins is all over it, and McGowan has since indicated that she was exploited by the filmmakers… well, that might say less about Rodriguez’s skills and more about my—admittedly not great—ability compartmentalize my experience with entertainment.