I guess Planet Terror is about as well made as you could expect such an homage to be, but...

(contains a spoiler or two)


I watched Terror, the Robert Rodriguez part of Grindhouse, on DVD. I decided to give it a try because I had read that he intended it as homage to the movies of John Carpenter, which interested me.

But I was always less surprised that the Grindhouse films didn't perform well at the box office than I was that anyone ever expected them to. Whatever made anyone think that an homage to exploitation films of the '70s and '80s would play for a mainstream audience in 2007?

The whole thing, to me, always had a whiff of smug arrogance like the smell-their-own-farts guys in that episode of South Park. I wonder if anyone ever said: Hey, just because our friends like it (especially when they're drunk or stoned)...







Even with appearances by real lookers like Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton, and Stacy Ferguson's breasts (in a bra); no matter how well made the homage is...

I just keep coming back to the question of: Why? (I should say I haven't seen Death Proof)

I can't call myself an expert on Rodriguez films, so I may be completely off-base about this. But from what I've seen (some of which I've liked), a thought occurs to me. The problem is, by limiting himself to the restrictions of pretending he's a low-budget filmmaker in 1980...Rodriguez may have revealed something about his work. Something that would have been better kept hidden.

I suspect it's more about amazing visuals than it is about funny, smart scripts. Because denied one, he shows how impoverished he is when it comes to the latter.

But then, I've never really understood what is supposed to be so stimulating about movies that are about other movies. This also gets in the way of my appreciating the fantastic-ness that is Quentin Tarantino (I still can't sit through either part of Kill Bill).

I listened to Rodriguez's DVD commentary, and a signifigant portion of it is devoted to his saying he got this from that movie, this from that one, and so on.

I have a lot of fond memories of the movies and TV series I watched when I was a pre-teen, too. But I have yet to want to write a story about a Jedi Knight Ghostbusting Time Lord.

I also question just how fine is the line between making an "homage" to the values of exploitation pictures...and just making one, and thus embodying those values, yourself. When Tarantino plays a guy who is creepy to Rose McGowan in Terror, he ends up with a broken piece of wood in the eye (and worse) for his troubles. That fact doesn't erase for me the suspicion that he was getting off being creepy.

It reminds me of the kinds of guys who tell sexist, gross, and homophobic (there's a big example of The Lesbian Cliche in the film, Rodriguez's second in a row to include it) jokes. And then fall back upon a defensive "jeez, man, it was only a joke!" if anyone is offended.

Or the guy who hits just a fraction too hard when "roughhousing."