Movie: Grindhouse

No spoilers.

D-, Z-, and I caught Grindhouse at the Parkway Theater in Oakland last night (8:30 show, 3 hour-long movie, woof). In case my gentle readers are somehow not familiar with the Parkway, it's a Speakeasy theater, which is to say there are couches and tables, they serve beer and pizza, and the audience is pretty much expected to get rowdy and into the film.

In other words, the perfect place to see Grindhouse, Rodriguez and Tarantino's homage to the 'sploitation films of the 70s.

There are two films here, Planet Terror and Death Proof, with trailers at the beginning and in the middle for that supersweet, supercheey, superdisturbing stuff the studios were cranking out in the 70s just for kicks and giggles. (The trailer for "Don't," for example, is sheer genius.) Of the two films, PT is the more immediately fun film, packed from the word go with zombie-licious horror and wham-bam-thank-ye-ma'am-Fu; this is not a film likely to surprise unless you happened to miss the 70s altogether, in which case, you'll still recognize all of the cliches from every derivative film from then to now. It's gross, it's loud, it's painful, it's funny, it's fun.

Death Proof starts off slow, and for those of you not familiar with the zero-sum karma rules of horror, you might start thinking, as I did, that good old Quentin has simply missed the mark this time. Talk, talk, talk. Will no one shut this man up? And then, just as you're about to really lose it, he cranks the entire enterprise up to 11. Then it slows down again. And then it picks up to the point where I was actually nervous for the poor characters. And then he jumps the amps to freaking 22, and the entire theater is roaring with approval.

Goddamn, that man knows what he's doing.

Grindhouse. If you don't own a 50" TV and have a grinch of friends willing to come over and drink beer and throw popcorn around your living room, see it before it leaves the theaters.