A two-headed monster from fanboy kings Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, "Grindhouse" is a full-blooded attempt to summon up a bygone age of cinematic sleaze. Or, to put it more cynically, it's an exploitation bonanza in which the most effectively exploited element is the marketing concept.
The filmmakers are not just celebrating an idealized notion of movie trash; they mean to simulate the experience of spending a night in a decrepit, sticky-floored movie palace. It's a tough thing to pull off in the age of the faceless multiplex (suggestively scented scratch-and-sniff cards would have helped), so they pile on winking signifiers of authenticity. This three-hour-plus program includes two feature films, vintage "Our Feature Presentation" title cards and trailers for nonexistent but entirely plausible genre abominations. The movies themselves suffer "missing" reels and are disfigured with scratches and glitches (added, one assumes, with a few clicks of a mouse).
It goes without saying that Tarantino and Rodriguez, favorite sons of the Weinstein Co., have access to resources that were off-limits to the '60s and '70s schlock merchants they revere: money, technology, stars. The budget of this double feature could have funded literally hundreds of exploitation cheapies back in the day.
Truth be told, the films bear only superficial resemblance to the sordid spectacles that inspired them. Still, setting aside the dubious coherence and suspect nostalgia of the enterprise, "Grindhouse" is a fascinating exercise in genre reinvention, a showcase for two radically different approaches to homage. Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" is a whole-hog pastiche bordering on parody, with a scattershot method perfectly evoked by its most iconic image: one-legged go-go dancer (Rose McGowan) spraying her machine-gun prosthetic at all comers. Tarantino's exhilarating "Death Proof" combines the sorority slice-and-dice with the automotive bump-and-grind and ends up with something greater and stranger than the sum of its parts.
Rodriguez's movie pits a hardy band of survivors -- led by McGowan and her diminutive biker beau (Freddy Rodriguez) -- against a multiplying army of the living dead. Drenched in blood geysers and exploding pustules, it's jokey juvenilia, lurching from one gross-out to another. The smirking disregard for basic narrative coherence gets tiresome, and the unvarying, unrelenting pace suggests Rodriguez misunderstood the assignment: His more-is-more attitude suggests a studio more than a grindhouse mind-set.
