Planet Terror

Here's the first part of that double feature Grindhouse that came out five years ago. It's something I've always had interest in seeing, and now here we are. And I think I'm impressed. It's tough to know for sure. On the one hand, Planet Terror is an absurdly cheesy and over-the-top zombie movie with excessive blood and gore and laughably bad special effect, riddled with about five dozen glaring plot holes and sporting an aged and blurry look comparable to damaged B-movies from the 1970s. On the other hand, that's exactly what the movie strived to be: an homage to '70s action-horror exploitation films with a few aspects made possible only by recent technological advances in film (such as the female protagonist's machine gun leg). The movie was a whole lot of fun to watch, but I just couldn't shake the fact that - although this was intentional - the movie looked and felt for the most part like some ironically enjoyable gem you'd find on VHS at American Video back in the day. I'm not old enough to remember the age of double features and grindhouse slasher films, but I've also seen enough of them in my time to know that Planet Terror absolutely nails the genre tonally and visually. I guess at the end of the day I have to give Robert Rodriguez and company credit for revisiting a long-abandoned film genre, even if said genre was abandoned for good reason. Fuck it - I had fun watching this, and already my appreciation for the movie has grown since beginning this write-up. I'm sold. I give this one a like, a plus-one, a retweet, or whatever your favorite unit of respect on the Internet is. Next up? Grindhouse, part two: Tarantino's Death Proof.