by Franklin Beaumont

Created on: July 24, 2010   Last Updated: August 04, 2010

"Grindhouse", Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's homage to low budget exploitation double-bills from the 1970s, features two very different approaches to the same concept, both of them excellent in their own right. While Rodriguez embraces the project and delivers an authentic recreation of the genuine article, Tarantino can't help being himself, with a contribution that quickly abandons homage and becomes a film that only he could have made.

Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" is a zombie infection splatter movie with shades of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror director responsible for "Zombi II", and the 80s classics of John Carpenter. In his film Rodriguez has great fun playing out all the essential cliches of the genre. Token a-list actor Bruce Willis is introduced with a shot of his face that last for about ten seconds before he speaks, telling the audience, “Hey, we got Bruce Willis!” The central plot about military canisters of zombifying gas set loose on a small town is knowingly incoherent, but provides an excuse for all kinds of mayhem, including a siege and escape from a truck stop restaurant reminiscent of a similar sequence in George Romero's seminal zombie picture "Night of the Living Dead".

The film has a dark sense of humor, and Rodriguez shows he's willing to go just as far as the films he is inspired by; a young boy is giving a gun to defend himself and told not to point it at his face, seconds later he does so and shoots his face off. Even in those exploitation originals, children were usually off-limits, but Rodriguez also enjoys subverting the conventions of the genre; his emulation of the true grindhouse experience extends to a reel of the film's footage being missing; skipping over the obligatory third act set-up that happens often in this kind of film in which all the characters end up improbably gathered in the same location.

But the greatest success of "Planet Terror" is that it stakes its claim for being a cult classic of the future in its own right, delivering the goods with zombie action and offering memorable characters and images, such as the diminutive, super-cool El Ray, and Cherry Darling's machine-gun leg. The whole film has far more charm, energy and invention than all the "torture porn" films and glossy remakes that make up the majority of horror films released today.

With "Death Proof", Quentin Tarantino intends to pay homage to the car films of the 70s - in particular the classic "Vanishing Point" from 1971 - but

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