Fair warning: massive spoilers abound.

Grindhouse, is of course, not a movie - it’s a media presentation put together by nerds to give audiences a sort of heightened-sensory idea of what they were missing by not being poor urban moviegoers (alternately: poor rural drive-in moviegoers) in the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s an advertising gimmick (one that, ahem, failed, in light of the film’s dismal box office take this weekend - but my 11:15PM screening was sold out). But a movie? Well, maybe the last seventy minutes or so.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy the hell out of the entire damn thing. I wish I could gleefully dismantle the sort of half-remembered hagiography of the 70s independent genre film that constitutes the film’s raison d’etre, but I can’t - I’m as big of a sucker for this style of cinema as Tarantino, Rodriguez, or any of the other major filmmakers consituting the grindhouse revivalism we’ve been seeing over the past few years (there is a reason, after all, that I interned for Troma in college).

There are of course two distinct ways of analyzing Grindhouse - a holistic approach to the text, trying to understand what it has to say about the nature of the grindhouse ethic/aesthetic, and a piecemeal dissection of the various components - the two features, four trailers, bumpers, and advertisements that act as discursive units of the larger presentation. Neither is precisely correct in analyzing the work, which is as much a display of synergy as it is of the means by which individual artists and craftspeople (I reserve the latter term for Eli Roth, who despite the good showing here with the ‘Thanksgiving’ trailer, has yet to demonstrate anything particularly artful in his films) respond to the same prompt. The entire thing manages to work as a coherent whole, despite essentially being an exquisite corpse, with each filmmaker adding their own interpolation of the ‘grindhouse’ aesthetic along the way.

So how does Grindhouse work holistically? I’ll admit that I gave myself a headstart as far as the ‘experiential’ element of the piece goes, seeing it with a few others at the AMC on 42nd Street, once the center of the grindhouse universe. Though the irony of watching this film in a 25-screen corporate megaplex (in a building that was condemned by the city in the early 90s as an early part of the Disneyfication of Times Square). And by tacking on a full reel of trailers for all the latest and tackiest looking comedies and horror flicks (some bit of squirrely Michael Cena-starring amazing called Superbad looks like the most promising post-death tribute Porky’s director Bob Clark might get), AMC certainly did alright by me in throwing the audience an unintentionally profound statement about how unbelievably retrograde-shitty our popular culture has become (a mildly-received trailer for some awful-looking bit of gay jokes from Adam Sandler and The King of Queens was wince-inducing).

I think the film - with its ridiculous runtime that certainly tried the patience of everybody in the audience - made it clear that part of the appeal of the original form was the way that cheap prices and constantly-running shows didn’t force the audience to sit there and appreciate Every Single Moment because otherwise, they wasted their eleven bucks (twelve if they actually wanted to get a seat and thus paid the surcharge on Fandango). Ideally, a theater would charge two dollars to show grindhouse and just constantly play it throughout the day without set times. Just come in, stay until you’ve had your fill, or leave where you came in three hours later.

But that’s not to be, so instead we have the experience as rendered to us by Rodriguez and Tarantino. It begins with Rodriguez’s trailer for “Machete,” a sort of Latinosploitation action epic with a coy allusion to Charles Whitman and a surfeit of hamfisted political commentary on this year’s gay marriage, illegal immigration. It’s a crowdpleasing way to start off the show, and Rodriguez is apparently already in talks to create a feature-length version of the film, to star Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin.

This is followed by Rodriguez’s feature, Planet Terror, about which I have to say relatively little. It’s a fun little Troma Studios romp, with grotesquely melting pustules and zombies and some remarkably outsized acting. Best here is, as the marketing would have you believe, Rose McGowan, who sells herself 100% as b-movie icon, drawing on the wealth of our cultural knowledge of her non-starter career (stuck in a garage door in Scream, dated Marilyn Manson for years) and, in essence, playing herself as Cherry Darling. It’s with her performance that the levels of distance between audience and text become blurred. Is Rose McGowan merely affecting a charmingly overwrought deadpan for the character, or has she assumed another character entirely, a bad actress named Rose McGowan playing Cherry Darling? This question - where are we to understand these features in relationship to the larger textual universe of Grindhouse - is never sufficiently answered, but in asking it, the filmmakers grapple with the problematics of viewer-text relations better than 99% of films produced today.

The other interesting formal element to Planet Terror is its use of faked distress, with scratches, gate-jumps, and blotches prominently displaying the falsified ‘antiquity’ of the print, both a presentational aspect and a formal strategy. As presentational aspect, the viewer is forced to appreciate film as physical text, the evening as reproduction of past physical experiences now lost to corporate exhibition and the rise of home video. And as formal strategy, Rodriguez correlates the print’s physical distress with moments of extreme violence and sexuality. The print color runs during many action sequences; jump cuts speed the course of zombie attacks. As if sputtering to some premature ejaculation, the film literally catches in the projector and ‘burns’ during a sex scene, starting up again on the next reel (having conveniently skipped a needless second-half-of-the-second-act expository segment). This sort of correlation between duress and textual distress is not innovative of course, having its foundings in the means by which certain avant garde traditions have been coopted by the sort of ‘edgy’ hackwork found in Natural Born Killers or Domino.

Between the two features are another gaggle of trailers, these from a trio of guest directors. A brief rundown:

Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. is disappointing, if only because it’s the single best concept in the entire film and the trailer just doesn’t milk that concept for anything beyond a few sight gags.

Edgar Wright’s Don’t, with its dead-on parody of the way American trailers for foreign films were designed to mask accents or foreign languages, is perfectly executed, and perhaps the most authentic trailer in the entire bunch. I could actually see this film existing, released by some second-rate Hammer like Tigon and getting an American run through AIP.

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which is available for viewing on Youtube, is about as obscenely sadistic as one might expect from Roth. Suffice it to say, it brought down the house.

And now, on with the show:

I always feel a little guilty about pretty unequivocally enjoying nearly all of Tarantino’s output (Kill Bill Vol. 1 is a little patchy, and I’ve never quite understood what’s so great about Reservoir Dogs), especially considering how often his work is championed by the Boondock Saints crowd. But if there’s ever been a reason to completely throw myself into the Tarantino boat, it’s Death Proof. Lyrically elliptical, with with the same sense of incessantly talky dread as Antonioni and Linklater, and with abrupt shifts in tone (Tarantino’s presentation of the violent ends women found in grindhouse films elicits few laughs - it’s completely unnerving), narrative focus (characters and plot elements come and go at will). It is, yes, at heart, another piece of slap-dash genre hackery, but it is much more, a defiantly personal statement about the twin pathologies of the villain and the filmmaker as well as an attempt to come to terms with the vile misogyny of these works he loves. There’s a bruising despair at the center of the film, and though he reserves his action for two specific scenes (between which he puts a lot of incessant girl talk, which I loved but which the audience seemed to hate), I was constantly on the edge of my seat, afraid of what might happen at any point.

And when violence does happen midway through the film, it’s horrible. This isn’t the sort of video-game kill-em-all smash-em-up that Rodriguez gleefully presents us; this is Tarantino coming to terms with corporeality, with the film’s first huge car crash specifically destroying two of his primary fetish objects of the film’s first half, the face of one of the girls and the foot of another, each shown in agonizingly realistic slow-motion. Kill Bill Vol. 2, in essence a meditation on the impulse toward violence and retribution in human narrative, treads in similar territory, offering a rebuke to the more sociopathic Kill Bill Vol. 1, but Death Proof manages to shoehorn a bounty of 1960s art cinema aesthetics and some shockingly authentic characters into what could’ve been, like Planet Terror, a sort of revelry of genre fun.

The star here is Zoe Bell, a stuntwoman from New Zealand playing herself, who demonstrates the sort of effortless badassery so rarely attributed to women in films. Unlike some other recent attempts at producing female action heroes (Jolie in the Tomb Raider stuff, Jennifer Garner), Death Proof makes very of explicitly sexualizing its protagonists: Bell, who was Uma Thurman’s stunt double in the Kill Bill films, is no saucy sex symbol, and neither is sidekick Tracie Thoms, playing a stunt driver. They’re a pair of movie-obsessed gearheads, yes, but more than that they read as actual human beings, working, living, and caught up in the day-to-day (Quentin’s exhausting circular shot around a table in a diner, which must last for a good 10+ minutes, is elemental in pasting on a veneer of extreme naturalism onto a world that momentarily ruptures into insanity. Thoms, who up to this point I haven’t ever found particularly engaging, is perhaps best remembered for looking completely embarrassed in every frame of the The Worst Shit Ever. Tarantino plays here with traditional dichotomies of femininity, overdichotomizing the void between the shiftless image-conscious partiers of the film’s first half and the career girls of its second half, but each group is allowed a meaningful and ultimately emotionally fulfilling sense of identification with the audience, making their tragedies and triumphs viscerally palpable.

The more I think about it, the more I think Death Proof might be considered his most interesting film yet. It’s certainly a mature work, in as much as one could describe the pointedly intellectualized deployment of extreme shock of Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont as mature.

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