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  #11  
Old 04-09-2007, 04:09 PM
b.miller
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Re: Grindhouse
ok, here are some movies that, if you liked Grindhouse, you may want to check out for similar good times. Some of these may take some tracking down, but others are surprisingly accessible.

PLANET TERROR
I don't think Planet Terror is really a grindhouse-inspired movie that much; i don't think Rodriguez "took" too much from anything other than the genre and kind of film it is. He does use Carpenter-esque music in parts and all the tough-guy stuff is reminiscent from many other films... but these movies do sort of connect:

-Zombie: Lucio Fulci's most well-known probably... famous for a scene in which a zombie fights a shark. Some great gore, very Italian make-up, and it's zombies... other pinnacles of surrealistic Fulci gore are The Beyond and City of the Living Dead.

-Assault on Precinct 13: Rodriguez takes a lot of tonal stuff from Carpenter. This doesn't have any zombies but it does have tough guys with guns. Freddy Rodriguez's Wray character seems to me like a mix between the main guy in this and Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. Other Carpenter required viewing (as far as I'm concerned) is The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China (even though they don't have quite as much to do with this movie). Note: don't settle for the remakes of any of these movies. All of them are missing the "Carpenter feel" that Rodriguez goes after with Planet Terror.

-Audios, Sabata: ok, so this is a Spaghetti Western, not a horror movie. But the director, Gianfranco Parolini, reminds me A LOT of Rodriguez in that he'll have traditional action elements but also a strong element of absurd humor, like he takes it SO over the top that it's not even so much cool as it is funny. I think Parolini had a gymnast or circus background or something because there's always a strong trapese or acrobat element to his films. Five for Hell is a great example as a WWII men on a mission movie where one guy's specialty is explosives, one guy's good with knives, then one guy brings along a trampoline. Audios, Sabata's great because it has Yul Brenner and one of the bad guys drops a ball bearing into a little cup on his shoe then does a kick so fast that he shoots the ball and kills people by hitting them between the eyes. That sounds right up Rodriguez's alley if you ask me.

DEATH PROOF

Quentin's always much more influences and also much more overt about recognising his influences, starting off is a list of films he explicitly mentions in the movie:

-Vanishing Point: This is a car chase movie with a really strong hippie existential bent to it, about a driver named Kowalski who refuses to slow down on a trip between Denver and... maybe San Francisco? somewhere on the coast. The whole movie's basically one big car chase and the white 1970 Dodge Challenger is showcased in Death Proof.

-Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a balls-out car chase film starring Peter Fonda and Susan George. This one's great and I like it a lot more than Vanishing Point because there's no hippie crap, just action. Some really great car stuff in here.

-Gone in 60 Seconds: "the real one" according to Zoe Bell in Death Proof. Don't bother with the remake. This is crazy stuff. it's literally all car chase. the plot and other equally worthless stuff are handled as fast and cheap as possible, lots of times with just voice-over as they show awesome cars on the street, to make sure every red cent went to the car chases. Amazing stuff.

-Convoy: I haven't seen this yet but IMDb said Stuntman Mike's ducky hood ornament comes from this so there you go.

In addition to the car chase elements, a lot of Death Proof is taken from North American Slasher films and, by extension, Italian Giallo films. There's no real diect reference (at least not that I noticed on first viewing) except that a guy's killing women, so I'll just list a few notables that I happen to like. Besides, both the slasher and giallo are SUCH strict genres that they're all very similar anyway.

GIALLI

-Bay of Blood: Mario Bava, sort of the prototype for the genre, where an unknown killer is taking out a finite group of people one creative murder at a time. This is also the blueprint for the Friday the 13th series and basically the whole genre.

-The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: Dario Argento's first movie and a really solid giallo.

-Torso: A solid giallo that I really only like for one scene, but it's completely worth watching for that one scene.

SLASHERS

-Silent Night, Deadly Night: just edging out Black Christmas as my favorite X-mas slasher, this one is amazing just for it's prologue with the boy being terrorized by his catatonic grandfather. Of course the rest of the movie's pretty great as well... killer Santa... great stuff.

-Halloween: I guess I have to mention this because it was so huge.

-My Bloody Valentine: Slasher + mine = good times.

A general note about slashers, if you're in the mood for one, is to go with the 80s originals where they actually showed the sex AND the violence rather than the post-Scream 90s ones where it's just barely the violence and never any of the sex. boo to that!

Now... for those still hungry for movies, here's a short list of some of my personal favorite exploitation movies. They're not really connected to Grindhouse in any direct way except to say these movies actually played the urban areas and drive-ins that the new movie wishes it could.

-Abar, The First Black Superman: Blaxploitation version of Superman where the guy uses his powers to mess with white neighbors. Absolutely hilarious.

-Cinderella: A sexploitation musical version of the story that's really funny and I couldn't believe ever got made.

-Poor Pretty Eddie: Hicksploitation where a black singer gets stranded in a backwater redneck town. I just saw this and it's already a favorite.

-The Candy Snatchers: Wonderfully uncomfortable movie about a group of people who kidnap a little girl for ransom but the dad doesn't care. Great movie.

-Impulse: William Shatner. That's pretty much all I need to say. If you think William Shatner is cool today, check out this movie. He also did a few other 70s gems that are unbelievably great: Kingdom of the Spiders and Big Bad Mama.

And lastly... here's a link to a full listing of films Quentin Tarantino has played in his film festivals here in Austin. They represent a lot of what he loves and provide a pretty hefty list of things to see if you're interested in the subject.
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  #12  
Old 04-09-2007, 05:21 PM
GreenPea
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Re: Grindhouse
Thanks man for your time making this list. I guess I am familiar with some of these movies already without knowing they were "grindhouse" movies. What exactly is grindhouse then? I saw pretty much all the Friday the 13th and Helloween series

And the script of Vanishing Point was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante I have to check this out! Not sure if I saw it or not.
  #13  
Old 04-09-2007, 10:46 PM
b.miller
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Re: Grindhouse
hey it's no problem. Always my pleasure to tell other people about movies I like (and I liked all that I mentioned). It's just that after that mega post, i was hesitant to keep going

I should state that although I've been immersing myself in these films for the past year and a half or so and I've found a ton of great stuff, I'm by no means an expert in the field. I am pretty lucky to be living in a town that still shows these kinds of films on a regular basis though so hopefully these posts don't sound too pompous.

Yeah, not all the films I listed above are "grindhouse" per se... Dirty Mary Crazy Larry made TONS of money if I read correctly, and was one in a line of mega hits for Peter Fonda at that time. Vanishing Point is pretty well regarded by mainstream critics as well as psychotronic enthusiasts. A Film like Willie Dynamite (an excellent blaxploitation pimp movie on par with The Mack) was not only a Universal picture but also produced by Zanuck/Brown, who also produced little movies like Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy. So in the case of Quentin's influences, it's not that he only saw Grindhouse movies but that he saw EVERYTHING.

So, my understanding of the term "grindhouse" is that it comes from the theaters of the 70s, mostly in urban areas, that would run double or triple features, often late into the night or even 24/7, grinding films out one after another while all kinds of questionable clientele went about their busienss, whether it was a junkie riding a fix or a prostitute earning his/her money or a homeless guy sleeping and maybe pissing himself, or crazy film lovers willing to risk a mugging or hold up or have their car broken into for the sake of seeing a movie outside of the mainstream. Probably the most famous example of this was the row of theaters lining 42nd street in NYC. Open all night, some playing porn others playing kung-fu or ethnic films (like The Chinese Mack or Blacula) or whatever. They pretty much played everything just to stay open and keep making money.

In more rural areas, the same type of films played the Drive-ins, also on double, triple, or quadruple bills. So to fill all this programming, certain producers and distributors, needing to fill their orders, made tons and tons of cheap-ass movies. They bought European movies and retitled them with names and posters that were nothing like the film (not to mention 10x more exciting), pretty much anything they could do to churn out product.

Then the theaters and drive-ins would book the stuff because it's cheap, so they may fill out a bill with a Hollywood movie like Jaws with a much cheaper picture like Pirahna, so they could advertise as a 'Don't Go In The Water!' show that lasts all night, or play The Exorcist with Demon Witch Child, or you might see across the street Abby: The Black Exorcist.

A good example of this is Tombs of the Blind Dead. This movie is a pretty surreal European horror film by a spanish director about the ghosts of Knights Templar coming back to kill whoever stepped on their hallowed ground. The ghosts appear in Templar armor and ride horses but, as we see in the prologue, priests burnt out all their eyes as they died so in ghost form they are blind (but not deaf!!!). So someone in America got a bright idea and brought it over, cut out the two or three scenes that lay out all the Knights Templar stuff, record about a minute of narration over a few still shots of paintings explaining that a thousand years ago, a superhuman race of intelligent apes came down onto our planet and waged in intergalactic war with humans. The humans won, burning out their eyes but one of the apes was the lead ape and he vowed revenge. They slap that onto the beginning of the movie, retitle it as Revenge from Planet Ape, and sell it during the height of the Planet of the Apes frenzy. Absolutely nothing to do with apes, but there you go.

So basically, a "grindhouse" movie would be anything that would typically play in those theaters. Before the 60s/70s, they were known as B-movies. Then as soon as home video started all the theaters died out but there was a similar all-consuming hunger for films to fill the rental aisles (and so grindhouse movies eventually became direct-to-video) and nowadays... I suppose you could make a case for direct-to-DVD stuff... and who knows maybe in 30 years people will be going through all of that crap and finding gems in the rough there as well. The general term that I hear most often and personally prefer is exploitation film, meaning the film was made to exploit some proven hit, be it a hit movie (Pirahna), a proven audience (blaxploitation), an in-vogue topic (remember that glut of Australian movies in the mid-80s after Crocodile Dundee made tons of money?), or the good-old standby: sex. The thing was, since they didn't have the budget or the star power to sell their film, they had to do it with gore or violence or sex... things you didn't see in mainstream movies. So that's why so many have awesome names and really great posters and outstanding trailers... Very often the advertising materials for the film were better than the film itself (how can you live up to a title like The Incredible Sex Revolution?)

But since there was this whole other world of film happening, there was a corresponding hierarchy of actors and directors that populated this world. Jack Nicholson for example, was a pretty big exploitation movie star before he got Five Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge and became a mainstream star. People know about Easy Rider but how many know about Hells Angels on Wheels and the original Little Shop of Horrors (shot in 2 days!) and Psych-Out? There was a whole group of actors like Adam Roarke and Antonio Vargas and Chris Mitchum who were never very notable in mainstream movies but were kinda kings of the cheapies. And it was the same behind the camera. Now-famous producers like Roger Corman and Sam Arkoff made all these movies with directors like Richard Rush and Jack Starrett who made no-kidding really good movies but never got much attention. The "Corman school" roster of directors is now pretty famous. People like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard have all gone on to become mainstream directors and have major hits, but they all got their start working for Corman. In addition to those, there are some directors that were just as good but, for one reason or another, never got their break.

Also, something really weird happened in the 80s. It was actually the very late 70s but really became obvious throughout the 80s. Movies like Jaws and Star Wars were basically B-movies with A-movie budgets. Once they made such an ungodly amount of money, Hollywood took notice. and so the 70s ended with their risky choices and original ideas and gave way to the 80s where mainstream hollywood adopted the exploitation outlook. If the first one's successfull, why not make a second? If it worked the first time, why not make it again? So you get movies that were originally very small and cheap (like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street or Dirty Harry) becoming gigantic franchise hits. And even today... basically B-movies with A-movie budgets... which is a shame because once they got expensive, all the risk and taboo were gutted out of them in order to appeal to the widest possible audience and offend the least amount of people.

That's the charm of these movies for me personally. When you watch a movie like Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, you know that every car stunt in that movie was actually performed by actual people in actual cars. No CG, no test marketting, no studio notes. That's why so many of those movies could never be made today. They are stuck in a period in cinema history where audiences were open and theaters were full and films had balls. There's a movie called Toys are Not for Children that is... SO WRONG... on so many levels. It's just amazing. If you watch it alone, it's guaranteed to make you feel dirty. The shit that happens to that poor little kid in the beginning of Silent Night, Deadly Night... is scarring. That just doesn't happen much any more. People don't walk out of the Poseidon remake and think "i can't believe what I just saw!" but whatever...
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Last edited by b.miller; 04-09-2007 at 10:57 PM.
  #14  
Old 04-10-2007, 03:58 PM
Aaron Contreras
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Re: Grindhouse
Tarantino is no longer ahead of the curve with dialog.
His music selection is still ace.
Planet Terror was way more entertaining. Both movies were too long.
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  #15  
Old 04-11-2007, 06:37 PM
jOHN rODRIGUEZ
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Re: Grindhouse
My only complaint would be not seeing this at a drive-in.

For many reasons.



OK now clean up yours.
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  #16  
Old 04-11-2007, 06:58 PM
koisk
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Re: Grindhouse
SOME SPOILERS BELOW

I thought the bad-film effects in Planet Terror were interesting. The film quality added atmosphere into the film - the trunk opening scene near the beginning (with the green fog, right before the first killing) was more scary and tense becuase of the film which was starting to scratch, crackle, and obscure the action much in the same way the fog was. I thought it was interesting becuase you can'd do something like that in a normal film - the audience would just assume the film was damaged and it would look out of place.

I mean, the movie was so over the top, so why couldn't the effects be as well?

As far as Grindhouse, I know the dialog was ment to be a little pointless, but it was really bad. It made me reconsider all the things I like about QTs movies. All I could think about while watching it was - Here are four Quentin Tarantino's sitting at a table. However, the last half was amazing. Kurt Russell's turn of character was cool to watch, but the chase itself was so gripping - it was technically very basic but so much more intense then any modern-day car chase sequence (CUT to tire, CUT to hood, screetch, CUT to Car # 2, techno music! CUT to road, argh!!!). It also ended perfectly.

EDIT:

Forgot - the conversation about "The Who." UGHH. I thought that was infinitely terrible. Tarantino and Rodriguez might as well have photoshopped thier faces on the characters and had the conversation in the middle of the thing.
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Last edited by koisk; 04-11-2007 at 07:02 PM.
  #17  
Old 04-11-2007, 09:48 PM
Aaron Contreras
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Re: Grindhouse
Quote:
Originally Posted by koisk
All I could think about while watching it was - Here are four Quentin Tarantino's sitting at a table.
I thought the exact same thing. It was not enjoyable.
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  #18  
Old 04-14-2007, 08:27 PM
potatobroth
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Re: Grindhouse
while its pretty obvious that going from Planet Terror to "Don't" and "Thanksgiving" that Death Proof's talkiness would be a letdown in momentum, i still thought it was highly entertaining. the talking scenes were a bit over the top, but still kinda funny and ultimately the payoff was well worth the slow ride. two simple stories managed to keep me giddy and smiling the whole time. i'm just glad i was old enough to remember those crappy movie saturday afternoons on WPIX NY. "and now, without further interuption, the exciting conclusion to The Octagon."
  #19  
Old 04-15-2007, 07:18 AM
Scott Warner
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Re: Grindhouse
Quote:
All I could think about while watching it was - Here are four Quentin Tarantino's sitting at a table.
Hahahaha exactly.

I finally saw Grindhouse last night. Overall I'd say I enjoyed about 3/4 of the experience, particularly the trailers.

Machette and Thanksgiving were hilarious and both of them nailed the spirit of those old trailers - these double feature movie house places are a couple of generations before my time but I certainly remember watching horror movies in the early 80's that would have these sorts of clips before the movie.

Planet Terror was as advertised. My audio director at work would nod with delight to hear me say "The music was at least 50% of the experience". What good dumb fun this movie was.

Death Proof was irritating until the action sequences kicked in. I really enjoyed Kill Bill because, among other reasons, Quetin gracefully shut his characters up for once. Here it's back to four dudes sitting around the table talking about Madonna's big dick... and it's like, hey, didn't I come in to this GRINDHOUSE thing to see GRINDHOUSE movies? I like how he just totally bypasses emulating the shitty quality (both content and fake physical effects on the film reel) about five minutes into the movie and just starts making one his movies, complete with 70's record fetishes and everyone just too bad ass for you. It's not BAD it's just not really following the high concept of what I paid money to see! Also, I'm sick of his dialog... he's like slightly better than Kevin Smith at this point.

Anyways, cool stuff.

Last edited by Scott Warner; 04-15-2007 at 07:26 AM.
  #20  
Old 04-15-2007, 01:25 PM
koisk
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Re: Grindhouse
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Warner
Also, I'm sick of his dialog... he's like slightly better than Kevin Smith at this point.
I get that. I mean I love all the QT movies, but then after seeing Death Proof with it's grating dialog not only does it make me not like the dialog in this movie but other QT movies as well. It's a sudden realization that all the dialog is the same, just different subjects. I like your analogy to Kevin Smith too. Watching Clerks and Mallrats is awesome, but by the time you get to Clerks 2 and it's the same thing, you begin to wonder why you liked it so much in the first place.

Overall though I find these points minor, becuase I freakin' loved Grindhouse, Kevin Smith rules, and so does Tarantino.

And the music in Planet Terror was awesome as hell.
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