Grindhouse

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up to give us this two-and-a-half-hour pulp festival featuring two, count ’em, two turgid films shown back to back with faux-vintage trailers in between. The first is Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror, in which biological weapons are unleashed, sending scores of the undead to face … why, a one-legged stripper with a machine-gun prosthesis, of course. Tarantino’s Death Proof stars Kurt Russell as a gnarly stuntman who lures chicks into his car, taking them for countryside drives from which they never return. Grindhouse is gunning to be a lowbrow masterpiece. Then again, Rodriguez has proven to be an incredibly erratic director. As for Tarantino, his last work, Kill Bill, was overlong and uninteresting. And both forget that grindhouse theaters were typically drive-ins, whereat audience members could occupy themselves with groping and boozing as the third hour rolled on.