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So, last Saturday I went and saw Grindhouse with some dear friends. I'd been fairly excited about the film for some time now. Rodriguez and Tarantino both rank among my favourite "fun" movie directors, and the idea of a filmatic 'jam session' involving the two of them seems like an all-around great idea to me. Since the "Grindhouse experience" was basically broken up into three parts, this review will be as well!

Part UNO: The Fake Trailers

A wonderful idea, and wonderfully crafted. Out of the five trailers, I would have to say that Machete is the one that I would most like to see. It had Cheech Marin, what's not to like? Hobo With A Shotgun was wonderful as well. There was a definite "Snakes On A Plane" feel to it, that it wanted to take a ludicrous idea to fantastic conclusions. The others ones were okay, but I felt that they were a bit of a let-down knowing the quality of the individuals that were involved in them (Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, and Eli Roth). I think that if I had a video camera, creating fake movie trailers is definitely the type of thing I would spend my free time doing.

Part DOS: Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror
A zombie infection plagues a small southern town, and only a rag-tag group of misfits can stand between them and total annihalation.
If you're a fan of horror movies, you've seen this one before. Probably several times. Robert Rodriguez understands this, and so he wastes no time getting to the meat of the film - after taking enough time to set up the characters and situation, he skips over an entire 'reel' of film, jumping into one of the highest points of rising action, as Our Heroes start to fight back against the zombies. It's a neat trick that would only really work in this film, and it's gets us to the most essential parts of the story right away.
Overall, it would be fair to characterize the film as ninety minutes' worth of gun fetishism, dismemberment, and explosions, but there's also more to it than that - there's a lot of dark humour that infects the film as well. I know that I couldn't watch Lost last week without wondering when Naveen Andrews was going to start asking for peoples' balls, and the bits with Rose McGowan's character trying to adjust to losing her leg were funny in a dark, slapstick way as well. This isn't to say that the movie goes into an Evil Dead horror/comedy sort of area; the humour is there, but it's definitely subservient to the action scenes.

Part TRES: Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof

My initial reaction to

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