I’ve watched a lot of Tarantino’s films over the years. Pulp Fiction remains one of my all time favourite movies, Reservoir Dogs was excellent and he’s done a good few roles in TV shows like Alias. When he announced his latest project, two films packaged as one my curiosity was piqued, perhaps he’d be able to break the Hollywood mould that’s become increasingly prevalent recently.

Maybe I should have just stuck with the Hollywood films. Grindhouse just doesn’t work, plain and simple. Perhaps it would be easier to break it down by each film to explain why though.

Death Proof

Kurt Russell, who’s nearly 60 now and looks it, is a maniac stunt driver who likes killing women with his car. Not that that seems important to Tarantino who instead spends at least two thirds of the film following groups of girls chat, play stupidly and give lap dances. It seems Tarantino has a thing for sex seeing as how it seems to be one of the main driving forces in both films. It wouldn’t even be so bad if it wasn’t so overdone.

And when the plot does eventually come around to the action scenes they’re not that much better. They either go by so fast you don’t know what happened, so Tarantino helpfully replays it back a multitude of times, taking in every gory decapitation and death. Or, they last so long you become so bored you want them to die just to stop their idiotic jabbering.

There was nothing to like in this film. The plot was shallow, the characters pointless car fodder and the camera work slow at best, jarringly annoying at worst.

Planet Terror

This film should have made me happy, harking back to the old days of B movie small town zombie infestations. And maybe that’s why it failed so badly. I came away thinking I’d just watched the new Scary Movie does John Carpenter. The first thing you notice are the overbearingly tacked on film effects to try and make the whole thing look older but merely serving to annoy. The fake ‘missing reel’ warnings just interrupt the plot, serving no purpose other than to satisfy Tarantino’s quest for the perfect 70s B movie film.

The effects are either brilliantly realised as in the case of McGowan’s fake leg, or awfully awful when it comes to the zombie make-up effects. I know Tarantino wanted this to be like an old school zombie flick, but not even Carpenter was this bad and the Thing can make most laugh now at its outrageous pieces. The whole fake leg with gun seemed unique yet distinctly pointless. The characters weren’t even one dimensional and Tarantino’s starring role was just sickening. I can’t believe the stars attached to this flick decided to go along with it. This is definitely one of the worst films I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Grindhouse

I think the single worst factor in both of these films in Tarantino. His cameo in Death Proof was barely passable but in Planet Terror became downright wrong. When will he understand he works behind the camera for a reason? These films go beyond cheesy, beyond bad, to a whole new level of utter rubbish. How the critics could praise them I don’t know, but at least the audiences know what they like as both of these films have flopped. Maybe Tarantino will go back to making proper films, just not another Grindhouse or Kill Bill piece of rubbish.