Last night we watched Death Proof, Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse double-bill.   We saw the other half, Planet Terror, a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, and also enjoyed Tarantino’s other films so its a wonder it took so long to catch this one.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t gagging to see it, except to ‘complete the set’.  Somehow the concept of a maniac who gets his kicks killing people in car crashes just wasn’t tempting to me but I got it anyway.  Fortunately it far exceeded expectations, and it provided plenty of thrils and even more laughs.

I don’t know if it really worked as a ‘grindhouse’ movie though.  I can’t see it holding the attention at a drive-in too well.  Planet Terror really was action, and over-the-top action at that, all the way through: Death Proof started with half an hour that was nearly all dialogue, followed by some action and gore and then another half hour of dialogue. In the sort of film this was supposed to be emulating huge chunks of that dialogue would have been cut, leaving just the two car sequences and the lap dance scene plus just enough dialogue for them to make sense.

Of course, what I was watching was not the proper version – it had extra scenes added so it would stand on its own rather than be part of the double-feature.   The whole history of the Grindhouse project is complicated, and hard to follow but this is not the way it was meant to be seen.

But then I was watching this in the comfort of my own home and for that it worked just fine.  There was lots of dialogue, but it was trademark Tarantino dialogue, every bit as good as the classic scenes from Pulp Fiction. When you have the time to just sit back and soak it all up it is fantastic.  Quentin pops up himself, playing the slightly seedy bartender and so in all respects its a typical QT film, so when the violence comes it is typical QT violence, and there are plenty of film references to keep the anoraks happy.

Just like in Planet Terror there are stylistic quirks to make it look like it is a worn out copy of a film: the colours are those of vintage 70s movie stock, except when a fake technical glitch puts it all in black and white for a while.  There are all the lines and spots you would get from an old copy of a film, jerks from the projector, and even a brief notice of a missing reel.  All this is done in a way to add to the enjoyment on a sort of meta level.

The whole thing can be appreciated as a cinematic in-joke/homage or just as a straigthtforward exploitative thriller, but its probably best to lean towards the homage/in-joke angle or you will just get annoyed by all the deliberate picture imperfections.

At some point it will surely be possible to watch Planet Terror and Death Proof in their shortened versions along with all the fake trailers in one session, and I’m sure thet will be great, but until then the two individual fims will do just finefor me.