Is it possible to engage in hyperbole when discussing Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse? It’s the best film I’ve seen since, well, Kill Bill Vol.1; the rare kind of picture that you want to see three times in the same day and bring friends to. Grindhouse is not only enormously entertaining, it’s divisive and alienating to the majority of the filmgoing public, in that sense a true according-to-Hoyle cult classic. Both films (Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof) are brilliant and what’s more need to be seen together, in order and in a movie theater, with the “missing footage” still missing. I hear rumors that the films are going to be released apart with the missing footage added in for the DVD release and it boils my fucking blood. Any asshole condoning such a thing is a fucking douchebag and needs to get the fuck out, right now!

I can’t stand hearing people preferring one over the other either; as soon as somebody says that Death Proof is clearly superior to Planet Terror or Planet Terror is clearly superior to Death Proof I want to grab them by their collar and scream in their face. As with any true cult film, I feel as though I’m taking an adoptive role to this movie. I had nothing to do with the making of Grindhouse obviously, but I feel like these two films are my babies and I’m not going to stand for anybody telling me that one of my babies is cuter than the other. In talking about Grindhouse I feel like appropriating Armond White’s clinically insane proclamation regarding Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, "any reviewer who pans [Grindhouse] does not understand movies, let alone like them." (White, of course, ended up panning Grindhouse.) If you prefer Planet Terror you don’t understand movies and if you prefer Death Proof you don’t really like them. And either way, you aren’t fully experiencing them.

Planet Terror is inarguably more impersonal and “superficial” than Death Proof, but it works marvelously as a balls-out, piss-and-shit end-of-the-world zombie movie. I love this genre. Though it doesn’t quite hold up, Night of the Creeps was my favorite film as a kid. I thought the remake of Dawn of the Dead was as good as the original, which is justifiably canon. I was surprised at just how much I liked Edgar Wright’s semi-spoof Shaun of the Dead, and there is enough good stuff in the uneven Night of the Comet for me to give it “badly underrated” status. However, I can’t remember ever seeing an end-of-the-world zombie movie as good as Planet Terror. I actually think that it might, read might, even be better than the original Night of the Living Dead.

Up until the epilogue, the film takes place over the course of a single night. This is precisely the right decision. The very limited time frame accentuates Rodriguez’s excesses to the point that the film becomes rather overwhelmingly intense. There are car crashes, zombie fights, explosions, accidental child shootings, and attempted rapes--one after another. But perhaps more importantly, the past-midnight atmosphere seems to give Planet Terror the primal appeal of staying up past your bedtime. Maybe it’s nostalgia that’s getting to me, stupid old impossible-to-justify-but-impossible-to-dismiss nostalgia. As you might know, my childhood was fondly spent watching “Saturday Nightmares” and “Commander USA” on the USA channel in the ‘80s, and, well, Planet Terror made me feel like a kid again. Aside from the movie theater or the drive-in, the most natural home for Planet Terror is in the custody of a good horror movie host on Saturday night cable.

Rodriguez is a lot more playful than Tarantino with the film degradation and missing reel gimmicks. Tarantino sees his work as too precious to really destroy. Ironically enough, the whole thing was his idea and he’s too chickenshit to follow through. Rodriguez, however, sees it all as part of the film’s aesthetic. During the fantastic opening sequence, where Rose McGowan’s go-go dancer Cherry Darling does her thing, the film itself seems to vibrate with sexual tension. In “the elevator scene,” Tarantino’s “Rapist #1” taunts Darling by saying that she looks like Ava Gardner, but once she has a bullet in her head she won’t anymore. The film becomes particularly distorted at this point, the highlight being a wave of red that washes over the frame before correcting, accentuating the general feeling of unease in the air.

Even in seeing the picture for a second time, I was always afraid that the film would break at a particularly intense moment, adding an extra-textual layer of suspense to the proceedings. When it does break, it’s during a passionate sex scene. Rodriguez makes it sound more smartass than it really is, like he’s skipping out just when things are beginning to get interesting. It plays more like the Grindhouse version of the “fade to black” convention of the Hayes era. How do you preserve the romance of a sex scene in a balls-out piss-and-shit splatter film? You have the film break and you say that there is a missing reel. I’m reminded of H.G. Wells’s genre of “scientific fantasia,” seeing science fiction as a means of preserving the fairy tale in the age of science.

Planet Terror isn’t a parody of monster movies. Or at least when it’s humorous, the humor stems organically from the material and isn’t externally imposed by a hipster director that thinks himself better than the movie he’s making. Rodriguez pushes the melodrama just a tad too far in two sequences in particular. Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) has been paralyzed by her psychotic husband Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) and doesn’t have control over her limbs. She tries to open her car door and her wrist snaps. The score swells at this point like it’s a real horror movie moment and you kind of have to squirm at how hard he’s putting the screws to you. It reminded of that awful moment in Dressed to Kill where the heroine discovers she may have just contracted a sexually transmitted disease and DePalma wants us to initially think she discovered that her mystery lover is a serial killer. Later, she has her car attacked by what first appears to be zombies. It’s a false alarm, though, it’s just the babysitter twins that she kicked out of her house in the previous scene. This is less grievous than the broken wrist, but it’s still pretty damn cheap. I never believed that the babysitter twins would actually do that--they’re slightly bitchy teenagers, not psychopaths. While these gags have a certain modest charm and never really stain the experience as a whole, they do veer a little too close toward self-parody.

But for the most part, I felt that I was laughing with the film and not at it. As with From Dusk Till Dawn and Sin City (Rodriguez‘s other two pulp masterpieces), Planet Terror has a solid foundation built on strong, sincere, iconic actors such as Bruce Willis, Michael Biehn, Josh Brolin, and even Freddy Rodriguez. Their sheer testosterone-laced Godliness prevents the film from ever devolving into camp. I love the moment where Dr. William, having just been told that the thermometers he’s sucking on are going to break in his mouth if he ever loses his calm, does just that when he recognizes a fresh victim. I found myself giggling with sheer pleasure. Brolin does it a hundred percent straight, he doesn’t take it over the top, he doesn’t chew the scenery, he fucking sells this goofy scene like a grizzled professional character actor. There’s almost a chortle when Freddy Rodriguez’s “man without a past” El Wray gets on a squatty motorcycle and drives into battle while balancing on the hind wheel. But sooner than later, Rodriguez cuts to a shot of him firing his shotguns at the beasties that effortlessly recalls John Wayne in True Grit.

Forget for the moment that Tarantino could never make a movie as bad as Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The principal way, granted perhaps the only way, that Rodriguez is a better filmmaker than Tarantino is in his ability to capture the essence of the Spaghetti Western genre. Rodriguez is authentic Tex-Mex; he has this shit running in his blood. Though he claims Sergio Leone as his favorite director and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as his favorite movie, Tarantino can never quite appropriate what Leone has. When he wants screen deities, he has to go overseas to the Orient.

Tarantino’s problem (at least for the moment let’s just look at it as a problem) is that he hates men and over-idealizes women. Raised a single child by a single mother, he has learned to regard men as a dangerous toy. He says in the audio commentary of True Romance that there was this one guy who a stepdad to him growing up, but eventually he ran off also and the dialogue between Christian Slater and Dennis Hopper in the film is an imagined confrontation between the two men. On “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” he talks about his mom’s black football player boyfriend taking him to the black theater district to see a movie of his choosing. He says that the boyfriend did this because he wanted to bond with the kid. Tarantino hints that this was a transparent attempt to get in good with Mom. Tarantino never knew his biological father Tony Tarantino. When asked if there was anything he wanted to say to him, Quentin deadpanned, “Thanks for the sperm.” At the red carpet of the 1997 Oscars, he spat at Chris Connelly, mistaking him for the editor-in-chief of Premiere magazine when they ran a story about Tarantino Sr.

The sense of misandry that Tarantino cultivated in childhood manifests itself in his films as a complete unwillingness to embolden the cult of masculinity. Tarantino is fascinated by the ice-cool manliness of Michael Madsen and Bruce Willis, but as soon as they cross over to his universe they become dumb lugs. In a Tarantino film, men are punished for “being” men (I.E. kicking ass and taking names), usually by death but sometimes through anal rape, unless they finally see the light and acknowledge their wickedness.

As a man, Tarantino finds himself constantly implicated by his own misandristic attitudes. In his original screenplay for True Romance, the Tarantino surrogate Clarence is killed in a climactic gun battle. His wife Alabama laments that he just had to be the man. In Reservoir Dogs, the Tarantino surrogate Mr. Orange is an undercover cop that gets a little too attached to the group he infiltrates. He gets off on their tough guy bravado. He gets shot in the belly. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has a supporting part as a former gangster who retired to the Valley when he married Bonnie and doesn’t want to be dealing with any “gangster shit” this early in the morning. Keeping with the thread started in True Romance and continued through Reservoir Dogs, the Tarantino surrogate is Pumpkin, played by Mr. Orange actor Tim Roth and engaging with his girlfriend Honey Bunny in what Tarantino referred to in the screenplay as fast-paced His Girl Friday-esque repartee, which I think is his idea of a romantic relationship. Pumpkin tries to rob Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules character, but seeing how Jules has now just retired from “the life” Pumpkin’s life is spared. It’s worth noting when Tarantino plays a role in one of his own films (such as Pulp Fiction, Death Proof, The Man from Hollywood and in a sense really Reservoir Dogs) it’s as a more or less likable guy. In Rodriguez’s films (From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror; to be fair I have not seen Desperado) it’s as a rapist. When he enters the Rodriguez world he exaggerates the negative aspects of his masculine self so they can be more clearly indicted.

In contrast, Rodriguez doesn’t have any such hang-ups. Planet Terror celebrates masculinity in an extraordinarily uncomplicated way, unmolested by extraneous moralizing. The film has a deep understanding of the zombie genre. The zombie is a distinctly feminine threat. It’s the personification of the vagina dentata. The drive here is one of assimilation by cannibalism; if you bite off the penis you feminize the otherwise threatening male. Zombies make other zombies by biting them. Planet Terror is filled with castration anxiety. Literally so, as seen with the slightly swishy research scientist Abby (Naveen Andrews) who demands the testicles of those who displease him. He keeps them in a jar that drops and shatters once the shit goes down. In a very nice touch, Rodriguez has him compulsively gather up as many of his little trophies as he can before running off. Abby is responsible for releasing the chemical agent that turns living persons into diseased zombies, and so essentially the origin of the zombie disease can be linked back to an according-to-Hoyle castrator. Direct exposure to the chemical agent may not turn you into a zombie and instead could just rot your genitals, a notion illustrated most memorably in a failed rape scene between Rapist #1 and Cherry Darling. In a later scene, we see a more covert reference to castration when Deputy Tolo (Tom Savini) has his finger bit off by a zombie. He loses and reclaims his wedding ring and tries to put it on. Alas, without his ring finger he is unable to consummate the penetration. (One shot in this sequence appears to be a direct spoof of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, precisely the sort of lowbrow gimmick that an aspiring exploitation filmmaker in the ‘00s would utilize.)

Planet Terror is the goriest, most disgusting film that I’ve seen since Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. I said of Apocalypto that Gibson seems to believe that the human body is beautiful, blood and guts are part of the human body, and so blood and guts are beautiful. Similarly, there is something kind of... wholesome about Planet Terror‘s obsession with grue. Rodriguez has a lot of fun playing with our strongest bodily insecurities. There are the copious images of male genital mutilation of course, but also note the obligatory reference to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie when Rapist #1 gets a wood splinter put through his eye and how the chemical victims vomit up their own stomachs when they’ve been exposed too much. Pertinent to our discussion, there is a great sequence where Dr. William is cornered by a zombie that tries to cut him with a surgical circular saw. It comes unplugged and so the zombie pops a boil instead and smears thick mucous blood all over his victim. Menstrual blood! The gore is a function of the zombie archetype’s femininity. It’s all supposed to remind you of a big juicy vagina.

I might have missed one, but I’m pretty sure that all the zombies are men. They only convert other men into zombiehood. Women they either kill (one victim has her brain scooped out) or maim (Cherry Darling loses her leg, but is completely unzombified). In a world of feminized castrated men, it seems that women have become obsolete. Simply because the zombies are a distinctly feminine threat, it does not follow that the film is necessarily misogynistic. The film makes it clear that the zombies are a threat to civilization as a whole. Abusive husband Dr. William’s infection is movie morality at its finest. It’s the revenge of the woman! The healthy heterosexual relationship in the film is between El Wray and Cherry Darling. She’s a bit of a bitch and he loves it. He admires a woman that will challenge him. El Wray gives Cherry a machine gun leg and they bond by obliterating the zombie threat side by side. Biological sex is seen as rather impertinent when it comes to embodying the masculine ideal. The central conflict between rugged individualist with a big metal cock and the collectivist assimilating masses dripping with all manners of vaginal fluids, it has a kind of purity to it. Planet Terror is Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy sans derisive irony. It’s the reason that I go to the movies.

I think that people are too unfamiliar with the modern double feature format to really get what’s happening in Death Proof. The first film is the new release that you really came there to see. The second film is an older one that you stay to watch, just because you want to get your money’s worth. Under the best of circumstances, you’re worn out by the first film and by the time you get to the second one you aren’t expecting much and are in a more contemplative mood. With Grindhouse, Planet Terror is the one you come to see. It’s perfectly understandable that people are leaving right afterwards, Planet Terror is completely satisfying on its own and could survive Harvey Weinstein’s proposed divorce. Death Proof is the one that you stay for, though. Tarantino is a sophisticated filmmaker and an experienced filmgoer and knows precisely what he is doing. He knows that “the one that you stay for” is the film he wants to make and he has gone to work digging for the hidden poetry behind “the one that you stay for.”

The iconic moment of Death Proof for me was of Sydney Poitier’s Jungle Julia sticking her foot in the rain and smoking pot on the porch of the bar. This is a lazy leisurely film and the feeling is infectious. These characters talk and talk and talk. That’s what people who know each other do. None of them are particularly complex or three-dimensional exactly, but by being in their circle for as long as we do we begin to really like them. We like being with them. Death Proof improves immensely upon a second viewing while Planet Terror does not. I genuinely found myself excited to hang out with these guys again. I was excited to just listen to them talk as we put our feet out in the warm Texas rain and “get our weed on.” As a result, the film’s death scenes and chase scenes are involving in the old-fashioned way--we have a vested interest in finding out what will happen with these people.

Let’s review a bit. The slasher genre is the masculine counterpoint to the zombie genre. The slasher is a masculine threat. He stabs the typically female victim with his phallic object and she’s begging for it. She wants to die, because death is the ultimate orgasm. Tarantino understands the slasher genre as completely as Rodriguez understands the zombie genre. I’ve always maintained that the reason Jason kills people in the Friday the 13th films is because they do not have lives of meaning. The people in those movies just sit around smoking pot, playing strip Monopoly and taking up space. They die contributing nothing to human civilization and so it’s no big tragedy. Tarantino is such an avatar of the slacker ethos that he argues that sitting around smoking pot and playing strip Monopoly is what life is all about. These characters aren’t really that much different from the ones that populate the Friday the 13th films, but we sympathize with them because Tarantino has successfully lionized their lifestyle. I watch this film and I think, “Fuck, I should have been a disc jockey like Jungle Julia.”

Alas the killer Stuntman Mike, like all good slashers, metamorphizes from thin air because these characters want him to. Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) is established as virginal or at least near-virginal when we learn that she is refusing to have sex with her boyfriend. Jungle Julia sets her up over the air saying that if a guy sees her, buys her a drink, and recites a certain Robert Frost poem she has to give him a lapdance. Of course, Stuntman Mike knows to do just that. Saying just the right thing in just the right way, he represents sexual adventure to Butterfly and necessarily an escape from the lazy luxuries of female camaraderie and a prolonged virginal adolescence. The more worldly Jungle Julia sees through him. She had just gotten into a fight with her absentee boyfriend via text message and appears to have accepted that this is basically where she wants to be-- with her girls. (After they finish at the bar, they plan on going to the lake house together. No boys allowed.) Stuntman Mike has a wet and willing partner with the blonde Pam (Rose McGowan). Despite her assertion that she isn’t going to sleep with him, she is literally glowing (Tarantino has lit her so she glows) with childlike admiration when Mike discusses his history of critics. Evincing a true rapist mentality, Mike refutes Pam for being too easy. Butterfly is the one he wants. Her ethnic East Coast “from-the-block” attitude gives him something to capture and destroy.

The second section of the film introduces Zoe (Zoe Bell) and Kim (Tracie Thoms), two stuntwomen. They namecheck the very same classic racing titles (Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry) that Mike did at the bar, suggesting that the three of them are made of the same stuff. Stuntman Mike tries to kill them while they are out on the road and fails. Admitting defeat he goes on his way, but they decide that they are going to track him down and slay him. Tarantino establishes that they have been out in the world of sex and they have survived it. Their friend Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) says that she didn’t sleep with the guy she was hanging out with because then she wouldn’t be a potential girlfriend and would just be another one of his conquests. Now that he cheated on her on her birthday of all days, it’s a moot point anyway. The two stuntwomen respond that he is only human. Zoe jokes, “Some cultures would say he made the wise choice” while Kim suggests that Abernathy ought to “break the nigga off a piece.” They then seem particularly invulnerable to the guiles of Stuntman Mike. They have seen death (sexual climax), enjoyed the encounter, and have more or less shrugged it off. Stuntman Mike doesn’t represent anything that is beyond their scope of experience.

It’s in the revenge sequence that Tarantino’s misandry fully comes into light. Consider that these charismatic young women who, in a moment that looks particularly questionable in hindsight, left their naïve and pretty actress friend Lee (the yummy Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to be potentially raped by a greasy countryman, are going to track down their tormentor and murder him. He’s screaming when they pull him out of his car and take turns beating the ever-living shit out of him. He passes out on the asphalt at which point Abernathy drop kicks him and smashes his skull in. The women are loving this, giggling like schoolgirls and having a grand time. Freeze-frame and “The End.” What the hell?! Even Camille Keaton needed to stop by a church before going a-killin’. This revenge doesn’t have the appeal of eye-for-an-eye justice. It’s weird, it’s as though the fact that Stuntman Mike struck first is just a technicality. Stuntman Mike has inner demons, he has a past, he has some kind of motivation for doing what he’s doing. These women do essentially the same thing and they don’t have any inner demons or pasts or motivations other than simple revenge. They’re happy and are going to sleep well at night despite just smashing another human being’s head across the pavement. The glibness of Tarantino’s amorality here is chilling and the best and possibly only justification for the sequence is that he’s working out some issues with the plethora of would-be father figures that let him down.

The catch here is that the misandry is virtually indistinguishable from the rather unreasonable adoration he has for the female sex. While Tarantino’s foot obsession has been rather omnipresent throughout his career, Death Proof sees him rather deliberately and elaborately coming out of the closet with it. The entire opening sequence is feet--a foot propped up on the dashboard while riding in the car and then feet running upstairs so their owner can go pee. Tarantino’s foot fetish is endearing and sweet. There are women, I’m sure, who find being worshipped like this a turn-off, but I have to say that I have little sympathy for them. Even I find myself falling in love with him.

The difference between Planet Terror and Death Proof is the difference between professional and personal filmmaking. The title sequence of Planet Terror strikes me as inerrant in terms of cinematography and editing. It’s a stretch of pure cinema in the sense that content is meaningless except as a vehicle to showcase the filmmaking. Death Proof is the exact opposite. Both Rodriguez and Tarantino acted as their own cinematographers, but this fact tends to have only been brought up when talking about Death Proof. It’s not sloppy and it’s not amateurish exactly, but it’s certainly a lot less technically impressive and a lot more intimate. There is a bi-directional synergy--a presence behind the camera that seems to be connecting with the actors. Maybe it’s the feet that I’m thinking about. Or maybe it’s the long circling take of the girls eating breakfast and talking about race car movies.

The divergent ways in which the two directors deal with the missing reel is particularly revealing. Rodriguez is committed to utilizing the distancing/disorienting effect of the missing reel gimmick fruitfully. The film burns right when the two protagonists are in the midst of passion and important plot points of the taut, narrative-heavy film are suddenly glossed over. Tarantino takes his reel out at a particularly opportune time. The missing reel acts like an eloquent intermission, punctuating Stuntman Mike’s seduction of Butterfly, and not as a true missing reel. No important information seems to have been disclosed. We can follow the film perfectly well and it looks like this is twenty minutes of extra fat that would make the film overly self-indulgent if it were left in. Furthermore, by removing the scene where Butterfly performs a lapdance for Stuntman Mike, he keeps this character that he has created and fallen in love with from being put into a vulnerable situation. What Tarantino does in Death Proof feels like cheating. He’s found a loophole that frees him from really challenging himself with the gimmick. However, while we could say that Rodriguez is putting the film before himself in following the rules, I’m not sure that we can say the same about Tarantino. Death Proof is Quentin Tarantino and Quentin Tarantino is Death Proof. It’s not an object that he created, but an extension of his being.

Tarantino, his misandry, and the overwhelming preference of Death Proof over Planet Terror by many serious filmgoers raises some serious questions about auteurism in general. Personal filmmaking cannot be thought of as positive in and onto itself. If Death Proof is Tarantino and Tarantino is Death Proof, then we cannot evaluate the film without evaluating Tarantino as a human being. What do we want from personal filmmakers? Do we want filmmakers that have a complete understanding of life and happiness and are going to lecture to us that do not? Do we want filmmakers on the same level of functioning as us, their audience? Do we want filmmakers that are fucked up and are going to use the art form to find catharsis? What gives Death Proof its soul and poetry is the depth and breadth of Tarantino’s juvenility. He’s Peter Pan, a kid forever stuck in a Never-Neverland where he never grows old, but he’s smart and honest about it and he spins it into gold. Once Tarantino grows up, I don’t think that we’ll see movies like Death Proof again. It’s likely that they’ll be a lot more like Rodriguez’s. Entertaining and with a genuine understanding and appreciation of the genre and film history, but essentially soulless.

I’ve seen a lot of critics praise Death Proof over Planet Terror by saying that Tarantino rises above the B-movie genre whereas Rodriguez simply works within it. This is what I mean when I say that those who prefer Death Proof do not like movies and those who prefer Planet Terror don’t understand them. Saying that Tarantino rises above B-movies heavily implies that the B-movie classification must be risen above. Tarantino subverts slasher movie conventions from the inside, filtering them through his own personal baggage, whereas Rodriguez simply serves them up in a condensed package and with lots of verve. While the Planet Terror camp seems to be unable or unwilling to notice or appreciate the complex tones of Death Proof, the Death Proof camp seems to have forgotten why they go to the movies in the first place. Death Proof raises Grindhouse to a whole new level, but the real pisser of it all is that its magic is unable to work without Planet Terror leading into it. The Death Proof advocates must be careful of advocating the replacement of “grindhouse” cinema with commentaries on a “grindhouse” cinema.

Grindhouse would be among the best films I have ever seen if it only had these two films, each one complementing the other, both entirely indispensable. The faux movie trailers are a mixed bag, only slightly improving the enterprise as a whole. Robert Rodriguez’s Machete finds real heat in Latino-Anglo miscegenation, and with Danny Trejo as the titular character bypasses denigration into camp much as with the iconic cast of Planet Terror. Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S. actually does descend into camp and legitimizes pre-emptive complaints about the entire enterprise. It’s depressing seeing how much money has been wasted just so Zombie’s friends could dress up like Nazi werewolves. Edgar Wright’s Don’t has the right look, but is dispensable. Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is the question mark. The film looks very early ‘80s, like Prom Night or the first three Friday the 13th movies; he has the feeling of the kind of film he‘s paying homage to down even better than Wright did. Roth is a genuine outlaw also; there is a real lack of conscience and good taste that’s liberating. He hasn’t made anything that could be classified in the same ballpark as Sin City, The Devil’s Rejects, Shaun of the Dead, or virtually anything that Tarantino has done, and Thanksgiving doesn’t suggest that he will. But the guy’s somebody to watch all the same.