Zachary FenellPlanet Terror
February 2nd 2009 18:05
Planet Terror, 2007
Planet Terror was half of the Grindhouse installment, the other half being the already-reviewed Death Proof. As you may recall, I was not enamored with Death Proof in any way whatsoever. The same cannot be said about Planet Terror.
I'm not sure how many of you have ever actually seen a real grindhouse movie. This "genre" is marked by extremely low budgets, ridiculous plots, gory effects and at least one hot and steamy sex scene that borders on soft-core porn. Robert Rodriguez got it. He understands what made grindhouse films such an awesome guilty pleasure. We get to reap the rewards.
In Planet Terror, a bio-weapon is released into the atmosphere that turns normal folks and dead folks alike into shambling flesh-eating zombies. If the affected person is already dead, they become animalistic and mindless. If the affected person is alive as they're infected, they keep some kind of mental faculty and are just really scary. (The intelligent, thinking threat is always harder to overcome than the mindless type.)
Wray, of Wray's Wrecking, picks up his ex-girlfriend, now going by the moniker Cherry Darling. She ends up on the wrong end of a bunch of zombies and loses her leg, and this is where we get the infamous machine-gun leg scenes. The action is implausible but highly entertaining as Wray and Cherry try to make their way to the "safe location" so that they can "solve the issue", but the plot twists that forbid them from "solving the problem" also create a not-very-happy-ending - and it's brilliantly cheesy.
Now, you'll also remember from my review of Behind the Mask and more recently from Texas Chainsaw Massacre that what I really look for in these horror movies is the deeper meaning, the transformation of the meek, weak or naive into the strong, self-assured and worldly. I'm not sure if Rodriguez meant to carry through with the underlying theme so well, but he did, and brilliantly (still with a heavy side of cheese).
This movie is definitely not for the squeamish, but if you love seeing Quentin Tarantino tortured as much as I do, don't look away for that long.
It gets four stars, and I'd love to see Rodriguez do more like this where he is NOT hell-bent on being self-referential.
4 Stars
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Comment by Drunk Rant
For sure the Drink of choice or this movie is Miller High Life
Drunk Rant