#169: Grindhouse

Grindhouse (2007)
Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Special trailers directed by Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright
Starring Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, Freddy Rodriguez, Marley Shelton, Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Naveen Andrews.

Never before have I had so much fun in a movie theatre. Grindhouse was exactly what I was expecting and exactly what I wanted when I went to see it. Sure it didn't offer anything new but that's the point. By lampooning and honoring splatter flicks from yesteryear it reached a somewhat more respectable level.

This is why I like Quentin Tarantino as much as I do. He's almost the equivalent of that one-hit wonder that maintains a crazy fanbase because he's not willing to conform to what their one hit would dictate.

Tarantino could have made Pulp Fiction knock-off after Pulp Fiction knock-off for the rest of his career and coast all the way there. Instead -- and it hasn't exactly been taken so well by critics, not that it matters in any way -- he's chosen to pay further homage to the films he watched as a child. What's wrong with that?

What you can be sure of when you go to a Tarantino movie is that it will be so slick and watchable no matter what the subject matter. And while some will disagree about his segment in Grindhouse, I think it's a wonderful addition to his resumé.

Opening night, I heard a guy shout at the screen "boring!" or "nobody cares!" during a scene where the female protagonists are shooting the shit around a table in a diner. It meandered a bit, I'll give him that but it wasn't out of place. And the slight glimpse of Mr. Kurt Russell in the background made it all worthwhile.

Rodriguez on the other hand seems to alternate making some of the most bloody and violent action movies with kid flicks for his own children. Planet Terror delivers the goods up front and just keeps it coming. Zombies or well mutants I guess but zombies all the same.

I thank Mr. Rodriguez for giving Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn work. Biehn was in some of the best damn action flicks in the 1980s (Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss) and has pretty much disappeared. After Grindhouse, Fahey has popped up on Lost several times, so there's that.

This movie is an experience to behold and it's best in theatres. The way the studios released it on DVD is a slap in the face to fans. Sure, they'll make more money by selling them individually but it really breaks up the flow of it eliminating any real chance of replicating what was seen theatrically.

I can even get behind the release of the two films individually for the reason that not everyone wants a three-hour movie experience with fake movie trailers in the middle. If that's wrong, however, I don't want to be right. So why not release an actual edition? A full blown special edition so that those of us who actually did pay to see it in its full form in theatres can enjoy it at home? Sin City got a big-time special edition treatment! Damn it!

Okay, I am coming off as a whiny fanboy and I apologize, it just doesn't make any sense to me why it hasn't happened. It would sell. And they could probably charge $60 a pop and still sell a bunch of copies to suckers like me who think the "full experience" is more important than eating his next meal.

The rationale, I guess is that the mainstream public couldn't wrap its mind around the fact that there were two movies. Never mind that the poster clearly says it's a double feature or that the trailer does the same. Nope, people still thought it was all over after Planet Terror ended*.

How does that happen? Even if you haven't seen a tv spot or an ad anywhere, or you just glossed over the poster, you would have noticed most everyone else in the theatre staying in their seats when the INTERMISSION screen started. Intermission is not the end...

So the movie was a box office failure and no special edition is in sight.

It was the best time I've ever had at a movie theatre. It was an experience, not just taking time out of your day to get to the next thing. It was exactly what I wanted from the beginning to the fake trailers to the end. Gore, sex and car chases. Really, who doesn't want to see a movie where a stripper loses a leg and replaces it with a machine gun? If you say that's stupid and unrealistic...you're missing the point.




*There were stories on it at the time. Since the internet search function pretty much only works when you need to find out about something that happened now or yesterday, I can't find them. I probably could, but it would take more effort than I'm willing to put forth.

#180: Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Written and Directed by George Romero
Starring a bunch of people you've never heard of


I'm not what you'd call a horror fan. Don't get me wrong, every genre has something worth offering but there is so much crap to sift through in the world of horror it's almost not worth trying. Luckily for me, my friend Isaac went through all that trouble so I didn't have to.

Video Stop, the same place my folks rented $1.00 seven-day rentals, is where he lurked. See, along with a ton of classics, Video Stop also seemed to stock-pile every awful horror movie known to man. And he kept going back for more.

Because of our friendship, I developed a knowledge of horror somewhat against my will but in the end it was worth it. If a horror movie was good he'd watch it again, if it wasn't he would just warn me against the real terror behind it...that it was a complete waste of time. Time we wouldn't get back. The horror...

He's a horror nut. For a while he had every intention on becoming the next Romero or Sam Raimi. At the time I had my sights set on the marquee. And seeing how he could have become the next master of horror I figured I'd be his Bruce Campbell.

He made a couple horror movies in high school, and considering his budget of zero and household appliances they weren't too bad. The one he made for his Media Studies class in his senior year, Revenant was pretty damn good. It was about a group of convicts trying to break out of prison. For one reason or another one of them had this spell that brought the dead back to life and obviously the dead wreaked havoc on the inmates.

I was one of them. My death scene was excellent. I was in a bathroom during the breakout and Isaac tried to jimmy-rig a rope system to jerk me around the room. An invisible entity was supposed to be thrashing me around.

After a couple run-throughs it just wasn't working.

"How about I just do it myself?"

"Uh...okay."

The end result had me screaming as the toilets flushed and the taps turned on by themselves and then my body flailed around the bathroom until I smeared my blood on the wall*. I cracked my head off the toilet in one of the stalls and I biffed my shoulders off the wall a couple times. It's amazing no bones were broken.

The film was finished, and I had lived my own Bruce Campbell moment for Isaac. Bruce has been beaten up and has the scars to prove it working on the Evil Dead series and I did the same on a scaled down level for Revenant.

Isaac shifted gears though after that. He graduated high school that Spring and moved to Halifax. He ended up focusing more on music and a couple years after high school he was the lead singer in the band The Search for Alexander and later played with groups The Magnetic Lines and Tattered Black Dress.

After a disillusioning experience at Dalhousie University and their theatre program I was done with acting, at least as a profession. Writing was eventually my decision. But those days of horror films have not gone unforgotten.

A couple years ago, Isaac and his friend Terry wrote Play of the Living Dead. It was an homage to Night of the Living Dead and zombie movies everywhere. Isaac showed me the movie in high school and I knew he loved it dearly. He did it justice in his own take on the zombie mythos. It won Fringe hit at the Fringe Festival in Halifax and broke attendance records at the Neptune Theatre.

Even now, Isaac and I are working on a novel together that brings together his horror sensibilities and my own active imagination. And instead of trying to be the equivalent of someone else creatively we're finding our own voices in the collective experiment. Yes we're influenced by Stephen King, George Romero and Sam Raimi, but we're trying to bring something fresh to the table. Whenever that happens, the horror fans know it and appreciate it more than the average fan. Horror lovers are rabid and while they may watch a lot of crap, they are extremely hard to please.

Night of the Living Dead and the stories of Stephen King have been inspirations to us. No they aren't the only ones but without them would we have the ideas we have today? Likewise if Romero and King hadn't read the books they read or watched the movies they saw they probably wouldn't have done what they did the way they did it. We all have our influences and it's best to embrace them instead of push them away.

*Above I mention my death scene where I spray my blood on the wall. Well I worked at a Tim Horton's around this same time in high school when we were shooting Revenant. One day my supervisor went in the bathrooms to do a check/cleaning. To his surprise someone had smeared blood all over the wall in the woman's stall. Somehow that's only the second most disgusting story involving a bathroom from my days at Tim Horton's. It's also only third in the top 3 gross bathroom stories of all time. But that's for another day.