Movie Notes: Planet Terror
= 4 stars
Starring Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Josh Brolin
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Synopsis
A nerve gas is released at a military base, and Stripper Cherry (Rose McGowan) and boyfriend El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) must fight off the resultant zombies.
The Good
- The movie is meant to be a homage of 70s era “grindhouse” movies — cheap, exploitative “B” movies — and it largely succeeds. There’s scratched film, a crappy trailer, and a nonsense plot centered around violence, gore, and skin. The film itself has that gloriously crap-tastic low-budget, first take, improvisational feel.
- Some really funny moments — the missing reel at the most titillating moment, a mini-motorcycle, a chef working on barbecue sauce, and Cherry’s ridiculous machine gun leg, which makes no sense, as why would that be any better than a gun held in two hands?
- The subplot of a doctor (Josh Brolin) who chews old-fashioned, mercury thermometers and his anesthesiologist wife (Marley Shelton) with color-coded syringes in a halter-top was creepy in a different way than the blood splattering zombies. The hospital looks like an abandoned high-school, and some truly gross / funny stuff happens there, namely some anesthetized hands. I actually enjoyed the hospital sequences more than the undead kill-fest that followed.
The Bad
- As the film progresses, the seventies parody is lost beneath increased use of CGI, most distractingly for Cherry’s leg and gross mutants — Bruce Willis in particular.
- I’ve always disliked it when Quentin Tarantino puts himself in his own films (he’s a great director; not an actor) and unfortunately he makes an extremely retarded appearance in this one.
- This movie is meant as a homage to terrible movies, where the pleasure lies in the unintentionally humorous. So the exercise here is being “intentionally bad” and the results are a bit mixed, as if Rodriguez can’t be as terrible as he wants to be, or his talent just won’t let him make a truly schlock-tastic film. At worst, the entire concept is like many a cover tune — at times, the original article is unintentionally awful, and therefore, better.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Planet Terror proved an entertaining movie with an unusual mix of bad, good, and silly moments, and largely met its intent of paying homage to seventies cinematic crapola. Definitely worth a rental.
IMDB: Grindhouse Planet Terror
Wikipedia: Grindhouse
Rotten Tomatoes: Grindhouse