Planet Terror (2007)

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.

Death Proof (2007)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Zoë Bell, Rose McGowan

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. But I honestly have no memory of Planet Terror (2007) the other half of the Grindhouse double feature.

Did I Like It: Which I think speaks volume for this film. I wrote about Jackie Brown (1997) recently that it was the most anonymous of Tarantino’s films, whereas this is the exact opposite. From the opening shot of a woman’s feet* all the way to the cameo of Big Kahuna Burger, this a concentrated dose of Tarantino. If you’re disinclined to like his work, then the film never has a chance.

Thankfully, I’m inclined to the opposite, so the film works, if not to the delirious highs of something like Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood (2019). What holds it down from true greatness is the format. Tarantino has always been interesting in committing homage to exploitation films of the 1970s, but he has always been remixing those elements to create new, vibrant art. Here, he is trying to make one of those films that he so enjoyed. The stark cutting would have riddled films of the genre, but that is part of the environment through which we see those films. Here, it is artificial, and to much less effect. Death Proof is a worthy experiment, if not the crown jewel of the man’s work.

That being said, the stunt work—the film’s entire reason for existing—is exquisite, and of a type we are not likely to ever see in films again. That alone is worth the price of admission, or the purchase of a DVD.

*One wonders if at a certain point Tarantino gleefully steered that motif into parody. We all laugh about the man’s foot fetish, but I start to think it may have been overblown. Then, I pop in one of his films and… Damn. That dude really enjoys filming women’s feet. More power to him, but it’s hard not to see the auteur in those shots.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Director: Marcus Nispel

Cast: Jason Momoa, Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang, Rose McGowan

Have I Seen It Before?: There is literally nothing in this film that has not been seen before.

Did I like it?: It’s probably unfair to expect a good Conan movie, but Milius ruined that for everyone who followed. Even a hypothetical late-stage Arnold King Conan would probably be something of a letdown, after one was subjected to Conan the Destroyer (1984). I’ve been intermittently reading the Robert E. Howard canon of stories since recently re-watching Conan the Barbarian (1982) and from a laundry list of muddled, droning sword and sorcery tales, films like this one are what Conan adaptations probably ought to be. At least this film sports a solid R rating, and doesn’t continue the trend of making the stories suitable for children, starting with Destroyer. Movie series like Robocop can’t seem to shake of the need to smooth rough edges to a dull, PG-13 shine.

That preceding paragraph may sound like some sort of absolution for the film, but it isn’t. This film tries for nothing, nearly to the point where I began to wonder if the production was an ashcan attempt by some half-baked production company to keep the rights to the character. Momoa has proven himself since to be a charismatic movie star, and he is probably closer casting to the original character than even Schwarzenegger was, but he barely appears in half the movie here—the first third of the movie consumed by a needless prologue that the original Milius film dispensed with in a few minutes. Where the formation of Conan’s sword makes a visceral experience out of the opening titles in the original, here it is barely-rendered and boring CGI, tossed off because it is a list of things a producer wanted included in the movie, not something that serves the story.

Scenes that hardly needed to be shot in front of a green screen are, giving the film an antiseptic feeling, where a Conan film should be anything but antiseptic. It should be positively septic, bordering on gangrenous. Oh, and it was converted to 3D at the last minute, which was probably useless beyond the tanked opening weekend, and makes it pretty much in line with every film released during the era*.

Eventually, I was consumed by noticing things that couldn’t possibly work, even in the context of the film. The battlefield c-section that brought Conan into the world? Dubious. Conan freeing a village of slaves, and then carrying off one of their women? Counterintuitive. The henchman who had his nose cut off by Conan, and the rails about the injury while sounding like nothing might be altering his speech? Likely the only thing I will remember about the film.

*The new trend in film releasing in the 2020s? Skipping the theater altogether.