“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. Do you hear me, Butterfly? Miles to go before you sleep.”
Last week we started the Grindhouse experience with Planet Terror and the trailers for Machete and Werewolf Women of the SS. Today, we finish the journey with Quentin Tarantino’s half of the double bill – Death Proof.
I enjoyed Death Proof as part of the original Grindhouse release, but not enough to really want to see it again. After the gloriously gory highs of Planet Terror, Death Proof was a bit of a letdown. Yeah, there’s one gory set piece, and the last twenty minutes or so is high-octane action, but there was so much talking to get through before then. So. Much. Talking.
So, while I have a copy of the individual release of Death Proof, I’ve never watched it. There’s apparently an additional 27 minutes of footage, which is usually catnip to me, but I could only imagine it was more talking. I’ve rewatched Planet Terror a few times – and even rewatched some of the Grindhouse trailers – but this will be only the third time I’ve watched Death Proof. And if I’m honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to it.
But first, we’ve got another couple of fake trailers to enjoy. And while there’s WAY less gore than last time, we’re still on
(This means gory descriptions and images below.)
The Medium
We’re continuing our viewing of the 2010 Vivendi Blu-ray. More details can be found in the Planet Terror review.
The Movie
DON’T Trailer
This one by Edgar Wright always makes me laugh. It looks like a Hammer remake of The Haunting, and mostly reminds me of The Legend of Hell House. Seeing the trailer for Don’t Go Near the Park not long after watching Grindhouse made me realize just how dead-on this particular parody is. While the trailer is pretty silly, some of the imagery is quite horrific and I would definitely go see it if Wright ever gets around to making a full feature out of it (as he’s mentioned he’d like to).
Thanksgiving Trailer
“You’ll be going home for the holidays. In a body bag.”
I’m actually not a huge fan of Eli Roth, but he nails the “holiday horror” genre with this trailer. It’s just so damn gross and funny. Naked cheerleaders doing splits onto knives, a mascot beheading at a parade, and is that the bad guy having intercourse with a cooked turkey? It’s all so wrong and so right. The part that always gets me is the detectives at the scene of the mascot murder. One drags his finger into the mess, licks it and says “Yep, it’s blood.” And then Michael Biehn looks into the distance and says, “Sonofabitch.” I don’t know why, but it brought me to tears (of laughter) the first time I saw it.
I haven’t yet seen the feature film version that came out last year. (I saw Michael Biehn wasn’t in it and lost a little interest.)
Death Proof
Quentin Tarantino’s Thunderbolt… I’m sorry, the title cards confused me for a second – Death Proof is really two films in one, making Grindhouse something of a triple feature. The first half is a slasher homage, while the second half is inspired by classic car action flicks like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (both of which get name-checked in the film). They both feature the same antagonist, Stuntman Mike (the ever-awesome Kurt Russell), and have echoes of the same structure (especially at the beginnings of each segment), but they also have distinct tonal differences. It’s like Tarantino wanted to make two completely different films and, unable to decide, jammed them together.
And yeah, there is a lot of talking. I mean, A LOT. Tarantino is a great writer, but he also loves the sound of someone else speaking his words. Could Death Proof be tighter and more intense without the long, meandering scenes of people talking in bars or restaurants about meaningless, inconsequential bullshit? Of course, but that’s not the point. This is a journey, my friends, and we’re going to take it at Uncle Quentin’s pace. Sometimes – and I mean each previous time I’ve watched the film – that pace is excruciatingly slow. And other times, like this viewing, it’s just about perfect.
The first segment follows a group of friends – “Jungle” Julia (Sydney Tamilia Poitier), Shanna (Jordan Ladd) and Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito) as they enjoy a night out, celebrating Julia’s birthday. A note of disquiet creeps in as a car driven by Stuntman Mike (Russell) is seen at both bars they go to. Julia, a radio DJ, has announced on the radio that Arlene will give a lap dance to the first guy to buy her a drink, call her “Butterfly,” and recite a section of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Stuntman Mike, not at all creepy with his facial scar and scary car, is the first – and only – person to make the attempt.
This whole section bored the crap out of me when I first saw the film. The mundanity of it. The conversations about nothing. When, I remember thinking, was it going to get good? This time around I caught the rhythm of it and went along for the ride. I bought into the characters, and Stuntman Mike shows up just in time to add some darkness, like a little extra salt to the BBQ sauce. The characters are all good, but Russell is fantastic. He’s obviously creepy, but his charm is so great you actually find yourself rooting for him to get that lapdance. (Something that is a “missing reel” in the Grindhouse experience, but is part of the extended releases.)
Half the fun, as it is in other Tarantino movies, is picking out all the references. The standard “movies, music and people Quentin loves” is in there – including references to Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman and Big Trouble in Little China – but I loved seeing the nods to Planet Terror as well. The Crazy Babysitter Twins show up, and the hospital where Stuntman Mike is being questioned after the car crash is the same as the earlier film (with Michael Parks and Marley Shelton making appearances).
When Stuntman Mike (I tried just typing “Mike,” but it didn’t feel right) gives Pam (Rose McGowan, doing double-duty as a Julia’s old classmate) a ride things quickly escalate, and we see that Stuntman Mike is actually a serial killer and we’re watching a slasher flick in which the killer uses his car instead of a knife. In no time at all every main character is dead in a scary (and gory) crash, while Stuntman Mike survives in his death-proof car. Survives to stalk another group of women, but that’s a story for… no, wait, we’re just going to jump right into that.
I did find myself wishing this WAS a full-on slasher flick. We’d get Stuntman Mike’s twisted backstory. We’d start with Pam’s death, but then the others would all be stalked and killed by Mike and his car in an escalating series of murders before he was finally stopped by final girl “Butterfly.” There’d be some kind of stinger at the end, where the car starts to repair itself (riffing on Christine) or maybe that scene with Stuntman Mike getting away with only a scratch or two in the hospital would been enough.
Anyway, that doesn’t happen. With all of our protagonists dead we need a new batch of victim… er, heroines, and Tarantino happily obliges. Luckily the introductory scenes where Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), Kim (Tracie Thoms), Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Zoë talk about their jobs, tell stories and gossip are fairly short compared to the first half. It’s fine on its own, it’s just such a repeat/echo of the first half that we (okay I) brace ourselves for another interminable introduction before things get good.
But Zoë (played by actual stuntwoman Zoë Bell, essentially playing herself) has a plan for their time off from a movie set. She wants to find the owner of a 1970 Dodge Challenger (the same kind of car used in the film Vanishing Point) and convince the owner to let them take it for a test drive on their own, so she can hang on the hood using only a couple of belts in a stunt she calls “Ship’s Mast.” This they do in short order, leaving poor Lee to entertain the owner, Jasper (Johnathan Loughran).
That’s when Stuntman Mike makes his appearance, having stalked the women since the beginning of this segment. A harrowing series of stunts takes place – some of the coolest practical car stunts ever committed to celluloid – before he t-bones the women’s car and sends Zoë flying off into the brush. Stuntman Mike strikes again!
But he’s picked on the wrong group of women, this time, and Kim nearly punches his clock with her pistol. Stuntman Mike takes off, and with Zoë surviving her tumble nearly unscathed, the tables turn and the predator becomes the prey.
This is just the most fun you can have with a car chase, and Russell is hilarious here as Stuntman Mike proves to be something of a weeny when the situation is reversed. Unlike the final scenes in the first half of the film, the car chases here are of a perfect length to keep the blood pumping and there are several “how the hell did they do that?” moments of terror with Bell on the hood of the Challenger. Stuntman Mike will receive his comeuppance and we’ll end with a dang catchy credits tune to boot.
The Bottom Line
And this is why we rewatch films, Butterfly. I very much enjoyed Death Proof this time around, finding the extended dialogue a fitting homage to the kinds of films Death Proof is meant to emulate. A lot of exploitation films would have these extended dialogue scenes because the “good stuff” was more expensive to shoot and, being fairly short, they needed to pad out the running time. None of those films had writers as good as Tarantino, though. I do think Death Proof works better as two very short films, rather than one coherent whole, but the experience was still a blast. I’m glad I gave it another shot!
The Bottom Bottom Line
I still prefer Planet Terror. Sorry, not sorry. The whole Grindhouse experience is a great time, however, and I heartily recommend checking it out. At 191 minutes it’s only 26 minutes longer than Dune Part 2, and you can watch it in the privacy of your own home with as much popcorn (and bathroom breaks) as you want! I really wish Grindhouse had done better at the theater, and that we’d gotten a whole series of Grindhouse double features from Rodriguez, Tarantino and their friends. At least we got this, though, and that ain’t half bad.
