Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

For the eight people who haven’t seen the trailer for the much-hyped new movie Grindhouse, they’re probably wondering what on earth a Grindhouse is. According to my trusty internet friend Wikipedia, a Grindhouse is ‘an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films…usually consisting of a double feature where two films were shown back to back.’

The term has fallen out of the public consciousness over the past few decades and has only now been brought back to life with an ambitious new project from directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. They’ve both crafted their own B-movies and slapped them together to serve as two separate movies but for the price of just one ticket. It’s an idea that I have to admit got the geek in me salivating.

I’ve long mourned the death of the B-movie, or at least the complete inability of Hollywood to create a decent one anymore. Last year Slither and Snakes on a Plane both made admirable efforts but were both branded as commercial failures. This year we’ve already seen The Number 23 and Premonition stumble, by taking themselves far too seriously. It’s a tough balance to perfect. To keep one’s tongue-in-cheek without letting parody get the better of you. What the B-movie truly needs is affection. In other words, B-movies need to be made by filmmakers who love B-movies.

In Grindhouse, we see the work of two directors with an immeasurable passion for what they are doing. What’s so important about this pair of directors is they both share the same mindset of not making movies for awards or acclaim but simply making the movies they would love to see themselves. It’s this personal touch that elevates Grindhouse into something far more than what you may expect.

The first movie in the double feature comes from Rodriguez and is entitled Planet Terror. It involves a stripper named Candy (Rose McGowan) who yearns to leave her tawdry career and become a stand-up comedian. Thing is, she finds herself in the middle of a grisly biochemical infestation overtaking her whole town and one of its first victims is her right leg.

She teams up with her old love - Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) - and an ecclectic group of survivors trying to fend off the flesh-eating mutants that are slowly taking over the world.

Planet Terror harkens back to the lurid monster movies of the 1950s, all the way from the grainy film stock to the gooey special effects. For those who go in expecting to find some sort of scare content, they’ll be sorely disappointed. A horror film it may be, but Rodriguez is far too busy making things fun to even bother with making it scary.

And luckily, it’s heaps of fun. The script is deliberately stocked with clichéd dialogue and contrived melodrama but Rodriguez manages to reign it in enough to still care about the characters involved. He never pokes fun at these people or ...